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"I'm coming aboard you." "Very well," was the reply. The two vessels drew close together. Jack had the destroyer's launch lowered, climbed in and crossed to the Ventura, where a ladder was lowered for him. On deck he was greeted by a grizzled old sailor, who introduced himself as Captain Griswold. "Come to my cabin, sir," he said to Jack. "We can talk there without being interrupted."
The lapse of four hundred years had restored to nature his artificial landscape: the Vale of Tempe had forgotten its name; Peneus and Alpheus flowed unnoticed through tracts of wood or wilderness; but upon the multitude of edifices, the dwellings, theatres, hippodromes, galleries, lecture halls, no destroyer's hand had yet fallen.
For some weeks, at least, this poor lamb is safe from the destroyer's clutches. I must improve to the utmost those few precious days in strengthening her in her holy purpose. But, after all, he will return, daring and cunning as ever; and then will not the fascination recommence? And, as he mused, a little fiend passed by, and whispered, 'Unless he comes up to-night, he is a ruined man.
One of our destroyers was making 11 knots one night the best she could do under the weather conditions and an ash-can was washed overboard by a heavy sea. Our destroyer's stern came so near to being blown off that her crew thought sure she was gone; she had to feel the rest of the way most carefully to port.
Again the destroyer's gun roared, and the deckhouse melted in a shower of splinters. Ken, struck on the leg by one of them, toppled over helplessly. His leg felt numb, he could not move. There was nothing for it now but to await the inevitable end. Crash! Vaguely Ken realised that this was a heavier gun than the 12-pounders of the destroyer.
The point of the ram passed over the destroyer's bows, crumpled them up and crushed them down, and the Ithuriel rushed on over the sinking wreck, swerved a quarter turn, and bore down on her next victim. It was all over in ten minutes. The Ithuriel rushed hither and thither among the destroyers like some leviathan of the deep.
The crew of the U-boat, all of whom had life-preservers about their waists, leaped into the water and swam to the Fanning; most of them were exhausted when they reached the destroyer's side. As the submarine sank, five or six men were caught in the wireless gear and carried below the surface before they disentangled themselves.
How is this great change to be wrought, who are to urge on this vast work of reform? Shall it not be women, who are most aggrieved by the foul destroyer's inroads? Most certainly. Then arises the question, how are we to accomplish the end desired?
Yet what is the fact? So far from any mysterious repulsion externally between idolatrous errors and Christianity, as though the two schemes of belief could no more coexist in the same society than two queen-bees in a hive, as though elementary nature herself recoiled from the abominable concursus, do but open a child's epitome of history, and you find it to have required four entire centuries before the destroyer's hammer and crowbar began to ring loudly against the temples of idolatrous worship; and not before five, nay, locally six, or even seven centuries had elapsed, could the better angel of mankind have sung gratulations announcing that the great strife was over that man was inoculated with the truth; or have adopted the impressive language of a Latin father, that "the owls were to be heard in every village hooting from the dismantled fanes of heathenism, or the gaunt wolf disturbing the sleep of peasants as he yelled in winter from the cold, dilapidated altars."
The destroyer's guns crackled, but it is not easy to hit a low-lying object moving at fifty miles an hour, end on, when you are yourself moving nearly twenty-five. Just the same thing happened as before.
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