ered
rather unusual. But they soon remarked that her bowsprit was completely
broken off. _Very_ unusual. Something decidedly is the matter. See! The
vessel is hardly anchored when the Captain leaves her and makes for
Megg's Wharf at North Point as hard as ever his men can pull! Something
_must_ be the matter--and down the steep hill they all rush as fast as
ever their legs can carry them to the landing at Megg's Wharf.

The Captain could hardly force his way through the dense throng, but he
made no attempt whatever to gratify their ill dissembled curiosity.

"Carriage!" he cried, in a voice seldom heard outside the din of battle.

In a moment seventeen able-bodied cabmen were trying to tear him limb
from limb.

"To the telegraph office! Like lightning!" were his stifled mutterings,
as he struggled in the arms of the Irish giant who had at last
succeeded in securing him.

"To the telegraph office!" cried most of the crowd, running after him
like fox hounds, but the more knowing ones immediately began questioning
the boatmen in the Captain's gig. These honest fellows, nothing loth to
tell all that they knew and more that they invented, soon had the
satisfaction of finding themselves the centrepoint of a wonder stricken
audience, greedily swallowing up every item of the extraordinary news
and still hungrily gaping for more.

By this time, however, an important dispatch was flying east, bearing
four different addresses: To the Secretary of the U.S. Navy, Washington;
To Colonel Joseph Wilcox, Vice-President _pro tem._, Baltimore Gun Club,
Md; To J.T. Marston, Esq. Long's Peak, Grand County, Colorado; and To
Professor Wenlock, Sub-Director of the Cambridge Observatory, Mass.

This dispatch read as follows:

"In latitude twenty-seven degrees seven minutes north and longitude
forty-one degrees thirty-seven minutes west shortly after one
o'clock on the morning of twelfth instant Columbiad Projectile fell
in Pacific--send instructions--

BLOOMSBURY,

_Captain_, SUSQUEHANNA."

In five minutes more all San Francisco had the news. An hour later, the
newspaper boys were shrieking it through the great cities of the
States. Before bed-time every man, woman, and child in the country had
heard it and gone into ecstasies over it. Owing to the difference in
longitude, the people of Europe could not hear it till after midnight.
But next morning the astounding issue of the great American enterprise