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Updated: June 7, 2025
"This was the first-born," the subaltern explained, "the first thing we could lay our hands on when the close quarters' trench warfare began." It was as out of date as grandfather's smooth-bore, the tin-pot bomb that both sides used early in the winter. A wick was attached to the high explosive, wrapped in cloth and stuck in an ordinary army jam tin.
Though a railway has been pushed up-country from Jesselton for something over a hundred miles, both road and rolling-stock leave much to be desired, the little tin-pot locomotives not infrequently leaving the rails altogether and landing in the river.
He did not choose to discuss his feeling for Lance with this cool, compelling young woman. Yet her very coolness goaded him to add: "I suppose men see more clearly than women that he's one in a thousand." "I'm not so sure " "Yet you snub him as if he was a tin-pot 'sub." His resentment would out; but the smile in her eyes disarmed him. "Was it as bad as that? What a pair you are! Don't worry.
The battle of the Falkland Islands, redeeming the defeat at Coronel, proved the wide range of action of fast cruisers based on European waters, while on the other hand the raids of the Emden proved the need of cruisers for defence on every sea; and the exploits of the Sydney, sister ship of Canada's unbuilt Bristols, ended all talk of tin-pot navies.
Local trains, drawn by wheezy, tin-pot locomotives of outworn pattern, arrived and departed with such casualness as to render schedules a joke, and not infrequently "bogged down" between stations until some antediluvian engine could be resuscitated and sent out to the rescue. The day coaches were of the old, dangerous, wooden type.
I had to watch the steering, and circumvent those snags, and get the tin-pot along by hook or by crook. There was surface-truth enough in these things to save a wiser man. And between whiles I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler.
I had to keep guessing at the channel; I had to discern, mostly by inspiration, the signs of hidden banks; I watched for sunken stones; I was learning to clap my teeth smartly before my heart flew out, when I shaved by a fluke some infernal sly old snag that would have ripped the life out of the tin-pot steamboat and drowned all the pilgrims; I had to keep a lookout for the signs of dead wood we could cut up in the night for next day's steaming.
We are here, gentlemen, to infuse a little of our Anglo-Saxon energy, and all that sort of thing, into this dilapidated old tin-pot of a nation." Here the orator was encouraged by a burst of applause. "Now, gentlemen," he continued, "isn't it hard devilish hard, don't you know, that so little is made of us? I feel it I feel it, gentlemen; our lives are being frittered away.
It was a great comfort to turn from that chap to my influential friend, the battered, twisted, ruined, tin-pot steamboat. I clambered on board. She rang under my feet like an empty Huntley & Palmer biscuit-tin kicked along a gutter; she was nothing so solid in make, and rather less pretty in shape, but I had expended enough hard work on her to make me love her.
I took an axe from the wagon also a tin-pot, and a piece of dry beef that still remained to us. Cudjo shouldered the axe and little Mary; I carried the beef, the pot, Luisa, and my rifle; while my wife, Frank, and Harry, each held something in their hands. Thus burdened, we bade adieu to the wagon, and struck off toward the mountain.
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