"Being a floating magnet, of course, did not prevent our sailing, so we went along well enough until we came to longitude 90°, latitude 15° north. Now it so happened that a telegraphic cable which had been laid down by the British Government to establish communication between Madras and Rangoon, had broken some time before, and not very far from this point. "Now you can see for yourselves that when an enormous mass of magnetic iron, in the shape of the _General Brooks_, came sailing along there, the part of that cable which lay under us was so attracted by such a powerful and irresistible force that its broken end raised itself from the bottom of the bay and reached upward until it touched our ship, when it laid itself along our keel, to which it instantly became fastened as firmly as if it had been bolted and riveted there. Then, as the rest of this part of the cable was on the bottom of the bay all the way to Madras, of course we had to stop; that's simple enough. That's the way the Water-devil held us fast in one spot for two days. "The British Government determined not to repair this broken cable, but to take it up and lay down a better one; so they chartered a large steamer, and fitted her up with engines, and a big drum that they use for that sort of thing, and set her to work to wind up the Madras end of the broken cable. She had been at this business a good while before we were caught by the other end, and when they got near enough to us for their engines to be able to take up the slack from the bottom between us and them, then of course they pulled upon us, and we began to move. And when they lay to for the night, and stopped the winding business, of course we stopped, and the stretch of cable between the two ships had no effect upon us, except when the big mail steamer happened to move this way or that, as they kept her head to the wind; and that's the way we lay quiet all night except when we got our shocks. "When they set the drum going again in the morning, it wasn't long before they wound us near enough for them to see us, which they would have done sooner if my lights hadn't gone out so early in the evening." "And that," said the blacksmith, with a somewhat severe expression on his face, "is all that you have to tell about your wonderful Water-devil!" "All!" said the marine; "I should say it was quite enough, and nothing could be more wonderful than what really happened. A Water-devil is one of two things: he is real, or he's not real. If he's not real, he's no more than an ordinary spook or ghost, and is not to be practically considered. If he's real, then he's an alive animal, and can be put in a class with other animals, and described in books, because even if nobody sees him, the scientific men know how he must be constructed, and then he's no more than a great many other wonderful things, which we can see alive, stuffed, or in plaster casts.