"That beats all records!" shouts another, and then there are cheers and great rejoicing. After the first fire scarcely a man hears the noise of the gun. It is a mere pop to them. Sometimes they overreach themselves in the desire to be quick and they make a miss. They don't hear the last of that for some time, but it's all in the work and part of the general eagerness to do well. Then come the 8-inch guns. The rumble and roar is only a little worse than the 7-inch guns. The geysers shoot a little higher and the echoes from the report come back to the ship like so many sharp thunderclaps, where the lightning is close. Indeed, if you want to have a better reproduction of thunder than any theatre can produce just manage to be on a battleship while it fires off its 8-inch guns in rapid succession. It's the kind of thunder that comes when lightning hits and you look out to see if the tree in your front yard has been split. Crash after crash comes back to make you duck and dodge until the projectile has finished its thunderbolt career and darts into the water with perhaps the ignominious mission of killing a fish instead of shattering a battleship. But the 12-inch guns! Pack the cotton well into your ears! Keep your mouth open! Stand as far away from the muzzle as you can on the ship! Secure all the things in your stateroom, for if you don't you may find your shaving mug on the floor and your hairbrush mixed up with the fragments of your soap dish! Close your port or else your trinkets may be whisked into a heap and some of them broken into pieces! The whistle has blown. The seconds go by, oh how slowly! Will they never get that gun loaded? Then comes a blast. The white flame seems brighter than sunlight, the roar runs through you like an electric shock, the decks seem to sink and you wonder if the eruption of Mont Pelée had more force than that. You look toward the target. There goes the projectile, straight through the bullseye. Then an enormous geyser leaps into the air more than a hundred feet high. Surely that is Old Faithful! Then comes another half a mile away. Then another and another and you wonder if the projectile is going clear over to Europe.