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Of course, speaking of men-of-war, we are referring to ships as they were till the invention of low-sided armour-plated craft, which necessitated a great, if not an entire, change of terms, and the introduction of a considerable number of new ones.
In the fall of 1863, the Federal fleet was blockading the harbour of Charleston, S. C. Included among the many ships was one of the marvels of that period, the United States battleship Ironsides. Armour-plated and possessing what was then considered a wonderful equipment of high calibred guns and a remarkably trained crew, she was the terror of the Confederates.
Now the white-headed sea-eagle, with its sharp incurved beak, terrible talons, and armour-plated legs, is a friend to all the little birds. He has the "stately face and magnanimous minde" that old writers were wont to ascribe to the Basilisk, the King of Serpents. They know and respect, almost venerate him.
We shall now briefly describe the Devastation, one of the largest and most powerful of all our ironclads. The Devastation in her after-part rises but four feet and a half above the water; but to meet bad weather she is furnished with an armour-plated half-raised forecastle, so that forward she is nine feet out of the water.
The hippopotamus reappeared amidst a smother of foam. Its wide-open jaws closed up on the gunwale of the dug-out. The canoe listed dangerously. The Birwas still further endangered its stability by standing upright and raining absolutely ineffectual blows with their paddles upon the armour-plated head of the amphibian.
Say, little feeble grey personage, what thoughts are in thy breast to-day, of the Fancy so still to call her who bruised thy heart when it was green and thy head brown and whether it be better or worse, more painful or less, to believe in the Fancy to this hour, than to know her for a greedy armour-plated crocodile, with no more capacity of imagining the delicate and sensitive and tender spot behind thy waistcoat, than of going straight at it with a knitting-needle.
This, it need hardly be said, is just what we find in the geological record. The fruitful, steaming, rich-laden earth now offered tens of millions of square miles of pasture to vegetal feeders; the waters, on the other hand, teemed with gigantic sharks, huge Cephalopods, large scorpion-like and lobster-like animals, and shoals of armour-plated, hard-toothed fishes.
"Gravel crushers," we called them. Big heavy marching boots, armour-plated on the sole and so large that they looked and felt like barges. In my childhood days I never could understand how the "Old Lady lived in a shoe," but when I saw these boots the mystery was solved; though, mind you, they were just the thing for France; and after they got broken in, we couldn't have had anything better.
Gavard once said to Florent in confidence that Madame Quenu was no doubt handsome, but that for his part he did not admire such armour-plated women. Lisa avoided talking to Quenu of Florent.
Amongst the different craft that caught my eye old hulks, placidly resting their weary timbers on the muddy bosom of the Medway, dismantled, dismasted, and having pent-houses like the roofs of barns over their upper decks in lieu of awnings; armour-plated cruisers, in the First Class Steam Reserve, ready to be commissioned at a moment's notice; and ships in various degrees of construction, on the building slips and in dry dock was a vessel which seemed to be undergoing the operation of "padding her hull," if the phrase be admissible as explaining what I noticed about her, the planking, from which the copper sheathing had been previously stripped, being doubled, apparently, and protected in weak places by additional beams and braces being fixed to the sides.
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