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It was a preposterous tale, and nothing would do but that the cable-ship Munchausen should take a party ashore where all might witness the fish of Tukuran taking a constitutional on the beach, after the manner of the oysters in "The Walrus and the Carpenter." Nothing daunted, the officer agreed to the proposition, and so confident was he that even Mrs.
In the testing room, that Holy of Holies on board a cable-ship, the fate of the Burnside hangs upon a tiny, quivering spark of light thrown upon the scale by the galvanometer's mirror.
Frank began at once, and, for a considerable time, conversed about the sayings and doings of the Wright family, and of the world at large, and about the loss of the cable-ship; but gradually and slowly, yet surely, the minds and converse of the little party came round to the all-absorbing topic, like the needle to the pole. "So, you're actually going to begin to coal to-morrow?" said Sam.
Half-a-Woman was also obliging enough to have a birthday on the trip, which we celebrated by a dinner in her honour, a very fine dinner which opened with clear turtle soup and ended with her favourite ice and a birthday cake of gigantic proportions, decorated with ornate chocolate roses and tiny incandescent lamps in place of the conventional age-enumerating candles, cable-ship birthday cakes being eminently scientific and up-to-date.
Some of them even wore hats, and straightway copied, or rather, tried to copy, those worn by the cable-ship contingent.
That marvellous little creature which, in the southern seas, builds its little cell, works its little day and dies, leaving to succeeding generations of its kind to build their little cells and die, each using its predecessor's mansion as a foundation for its own, until pile on pile forms a mass, and mass on mass makes a mountain the coral insect, had reared one of its submarine edifices just where the cable-ship Triton had to pass that day.
The cable-ship Burnside, as some may remember, was one of the first prizes captured in the Spanish War. She had been a Spanish merchant ship, the Rita, trading between Spain and all Spanish ports in the West Indies, and when captured by the Yale, early in April, 1898, was on her way to Havana with a cargo of goods.
It was the first cock-fight most of us cable-ship people had ever seen, and it was hard to understand the wild enthusiasm of the natives when, after unsheathing the steel gaffs on the roosters' legs, the birds were allowed to make their preliminary dash at one another.
But before we reached Zamboanga, a Signal Corps man, whom we left behind at Tukuran to complete the establishment of the lines there, sent a message to the major over the cable we were then laying, to the effect that he had seen a herd of deer from the window of his telegraph office that very morning, and, being a cable-ship man, and so not in league with the Ananiases of Tukuran, the major must fain believe him, whereupon he made some remarks not worthy of record.
On the evening of our second day in Dumaguete, the natives of the town gave a ball in honour of the cable-ship, at the house of one of the leading citizens. There, on a floor made smoother than glass with banana leaves, we danced far into the night to the frightfully quick music of the Filipino orchestra. One would hardly recognize the waltz or two-step as performed by the Visayan.
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