his country; but
perhaps you can tell us what stored electricity is, and how it is put
into boxes."

"In regard to the transportation," answered the school-master, speaking
a little slowly, "of encased electric potency, I cannot--"

"Oh, bless me!" interrupted the marine; "that is all simple enough; you
can store electricity and send it all over the world, if you like; in
places like Calcutta, I think it must be cheaper to buy it than to make
it. They use it as a motive power for sewing-machines, apple-parers,
and it can be used in a lot of ways, such as digging post-holes and
churning butter. When the stored electricity in a box is all used up,
all you have to do is to connect a fresh box with your machinery, and
there you are, ready to start again. There was nothing strange about
our cargo. It was the electricity leaking out and uniting itself and
the iron ship into a sort of conglomerate magnet that was out of the
way."

"Mr. Cardly," said Mr. Harberry, "if an iron ship were magnetized in
that manner, wouldn't it have a deranging effect upon the needle of the
compass?"

The marine did not give the school-master time to make answer.
"Generally speaking," said he, "that sort of thing would interfere with
keeping the vessel on its proper course, but with us it didn't make any
difference at all. The greater part of the ship was in front of the
binnacle where they keep the compass, and so the needle naturally
pointed that way, and as we were going north before a south wind, it
was all right.

"Being a floating magnet, of course, did not prevent our sailing, so
we went along well enough until we came to longitude 90 deg., latitude 15 deg.
north. Now it so happened that a telegraphic cable which had been laid
down by the British Government to establish communication between
Madras and Rangoon, had broken some time before, and not very far from
this point.

"Now you can see for yourselves that when an enormous mass of magnetic
iron, in the shape of the _General Brooks_, came sailing along there,
the part of that cable which lay under us was so attracted by such a
powerful and irresistible force that its broken end raised itself from
the bottom of the bay and reached upward until it touched our ship,
when it laid itself along our keel, to which it instantly became
fastened as firmly as if it had been bolted and riveted there. Then, as
the rest of this part of the cable was on the bottom of the bay all the
way to