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Victor now stooped and began silently manufacturing snowballs. He packed the soft substance as hard as he could while circling it about in his palms and rounding it into shape. When the missile suggested a 12-pound shot he laid it at his feet, with the whispered words: "That's for you, Master George Shelton."

Twenty years ago experimenters said: 'Give us a motor that will develop 1 horse-power with the weight of a barnyard fowl, and we will very soon fly. At the present moment they had motors which would develop over 2 horse-power and did not weigh more than a 12-pound barnyard fowl. These engines had been developed I might say created by the builders of motor cars.

Seeing that their case was hopeless, the French crew flung down their arms and cried for quarter, and in less than two minutes from the instant of boarding, we found ourselves masters of the "Sans-Culotte" privateer, mounting eight long 8-pounders and four 12-pound carronades, and with a crew originally of eighty-one men, of whom nine were killed and twenty wounded; our own loss being one man killed and one wounded.

I had seen and noted them before while in Sierra Leone harbour, and I was convinced that the craft was none other than the British man- o'-war schooner Gadfly, armed with eight 12-pound carronades and a long 32-pound pivot-gun on her forecastle, with a crew of eighty men under the command of Lieutenant Peters, than whom there was not a more dashing and enterprising officer on the Coast.

An order was placed for 3000 rifles, 3,000,000 rounds of ammunition, 3 12-pound Hotchkiss field-guns and 600 shells, machetes, and several tons of dynamite. The steamer Laurada was chartered, and the ocean-going tug Dauntless was bought in Brunswick, Georgia. A part of the purchased munitions was ordered to New York, and the remainder, two car loads, shipped to Jacksonville by express.

Stand by to give them a broadside as they pass." Ito nodded comprehendingly, and vanished from my side. A minute later, the leading Russian destroyer came abreast the Asashio, and Captain Matsunaga showed that he was as wideawake as the rest of us, by plumping a 12-pound and three 6-pound shells into her.

On the 3rd, a few of their infantry regiments, with a thousand or fifteen hundred mounted troops, and two batteries of 15 and 12-pound Armstrong guns, marched out of the town in a south-westerly direction.

Laden thus, they steamed out into the middle of the river, when a 12-pound shot fired across their bows, from the tug Harrison, belonging to the U.S. Steamer Michigan, brought them to doubtless to the extreme delight of Acting Sailing-Master Morris who seemed anxious enough to fire the gun and make the capture; although they would at the moment have stuck to a child hearing the authority of the United States.

It did not turn up, however, and by two o'clock in the afternoon every scrap of incriminating material was out of the yacht and on its way to the headquarters of the insurgents, somewhere up in the Organ Mountains. Every scrap, that is to say, except the four 12-pound quick-firers and the two Maxims, with their store of ammunition, which constituted the armament of the yacht.

He had gathered up many relics from the battlefield to distribute among his friends at home and decorate the family mantlepiece. There were fragments of exploded shells, some canister, a broken bayonet, a smashed musket, a solid 12-pound shot, and a quart or more of battered bullets picked up in his walks over the scenes of the heavy fighting. "Looks as if you were going into the junk business.