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In a general sort of way these were not unlike twelve-inch ordnance, but the breech was much larger in proportion, the barrel longer, and the bore only two instead of twelve inches. The mountings were high, and the adjustment so delicate that, looking into the open breech of one gun, the bore through the twenty-foot cube and through the barrel of the gun on the other side seemed to be continuous.

"But telegrams came into the city from Reno, thirty miles above, that there was a twenty-foot flood there and still rising. They've sent warning all down the river. "I have heard that alarm sounded ever since I have been at the seminary. It is always a twenty-foot flood and the word always comes from Reno.

At the side of the doorway was the tree which they had collided with, a twenty-foot white birch. The hut was even more dilapidated than they had supposed. It looked as if a good wind would send its twisted, sun-split grey boards into a heap. Inside, however, with the sunlight streaming through doorway, window and cracks, it looked more inviting than it had at night.

Sir William's first catalogue of new nebulae and clusters of stars, he said, amounting in number to one thousand, was compiled with observations made from a twenty-foot reflector in the years 1783, 1784, and 1785.

And we've got to get in there before the snow begins to fly, or it will play the dickens with us." Many a strange shift were they put to. Once Bill had to fell a great spruce across a twenty-foot crevice. It took him two days to hew it flat so that his horses could be led over.

In vol. lxxvi. of the Philosophical Transactions he says, that the idea of this construction occurred to him in 1776, and that he then applied it unsuccessfully to a ten-foot telescope; that during the year 1784, he again made a fruitless trial of it in a twenty-foot telescope. Yet I find that on the 7th of September 1784, he recurred to a front view in observing some nebulæ and groups of stars.

It was a careful, silent stalk until the hunters were within ten yards of the quarry, and then with a terrifying yowl of triumph, a living rope of dingoes four of them, nose to tail was flung between the big mother kangaroo and the rest of the mob. The red old-man gave one panic-smitten look round his flock, and then they were off like the wind, in big twenty-foot bounds.

Ten minutes after his last cartridge had been fruitlessly discharged, he set out for the ocean beach, pausing at the first dune he came upon to scrape a shallow trench in the sand and cache therein both guns and his game-bag. Marking the spot with a bit of driftwood stuck upright, he pressed on, eventually pausing on the overhanging lip of a twenty-foot bluff.

Their most formidable feature was the cone-shaped "canopy" of short-range disintegrator rays designed to spread down around them from a circular generator at the tip of a twenty-foot mast amidship. This would annihilate any projectile shot at it, for they naturally could not reach the ship without passing through the cone of rays.

To-day Neil was one of this number. Twice the dummy, bearing upon its breast the brown R of Robinson, had sped away on its twenty-foot flight, and twice Neil had thrown himself upon it without bringing it down. As he arose after the second attempt and brushed the soil from his trousers Mills "went for him."