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The effect is to partially arrest the swift motion of the rolls instantaneously, and thereby develop and expend an enormous amount of kinetic energy, which with pile-driver effect cracks the rocks and breaks them into pieces small enough to pass through the fourteen-inch gap.

And don't tell me I've got to get on the other side of the door by strategy, either. It is strategy-proof. The system of lookouts is perfect. No, force is necessary, but it must not be destructive of life or property or, by heaven, I'd drive up there and riddle the place with a fourteen-inch gun," exclaimed O'Connor.

It would take too long to detail how this was done, but you have a very expressive American saying, "money talks." I had the plans, firing systems, everything of interest about the new fourteen-inch turret guns. While in Glasgow I received letters addressed to me as James Stafford.

About a week after my experience with Constable Ross, I received information that William Beardmore & Co., of Glasgow, were constructing some new fourteen-inch guns for the British government. That meant a change of base. I at once made it my business to go to Glasgow and get particulars. I installed myself in the Central Station Hotel, and in a few weeks gained all the information I wanted.

We had turned the corner of Z Street and were approaching the house when a man walking in the opposite direction eyed us suspiciously, turned, and followed us a step or two. "Kennedy!" he exclaimed. If a fourteen-inch gun had exploded behind us I could not have been more startled. Here, in spite of all our haste and secrecy we were followed, watched, and beaten. Craig wheeled about suddenly.

There is, for instance, a steam-plough which takes twelve fourteen-inch furrows at once! What would an English yokel, meandering along at the tail of his two slow horses, say to that? His little job would be done before it was time for breakfast! Hullo! there is another field, all in stooks already look across the boundless plain to the horizon.

In such close quarters he could not use his sword, but the fourteen-inch blade of the dirk, needle-pointed as it was and with two razor-sharp, serrated cutting edges, was itself no mean weapon, and time after time he drove it deep, taking life at every thrust.

The two titanic war-vessels now in course of construction for the United States Navy will each carry a battery of ten fourteen-inch rifles, which will be the most powerful weapons ever constructed and will greatly exceed in range and hitting power the twelve-inch guns of the Delaware or North Dakota.

The fire of the Japanese fleet was now principally directed against the two large iron-clads, but the fourteen-inch armor of these resisted the heaviest guns in the Japanese fleet, and, though their upper works were riddled and burnt, they were able to continue the battle.

On she came, against the focussed storm of English cannon, her prow, forward turrets, bridge, masts, fairly disintegrated under a bastinado of twelve and fourteen-inch shells. Yet it seemed as if she would survive it all and ram some English cruiser, when a cloud of steam broke out of her hold. A lucky shot had exploded her boilers.