e is inferior to the old vessels, she is decidedly equal, if not
superior, to them in machinery and fittings. Her powers as regards speed
have of course yet to be tried. One voyage is no test, nor even a series
of voyages during the summer months: she must cross and recross at least
for a year before any just comparison can be instituted. The regular
postal communication between Liverpool and the United States will
speedily be twice every week--the ships of the new line sailing on
Wednesday, and the old on Saturday.

But other ports besides Liverpool are now dispatching steamers regularly
to America. Glasgow sent out a powerful screw steamer--the _City of
Glasgow_, 1087 tons--on 16th April, for New York, where she arrived on
3d May; thus making the passage in about seventeen days, in spite of
stormy weather and entanglements among ice; the average time taken by
the Liverpool steamers during 1849 being fourteen days. Her return
voyage, however, made under more favorable circumstances, was within
this average, the distance being steamed between the 18th May and the
1st June. A vessel called the _Viceroy_ is about to sail from Galway to
New York, and her voyage is looked forward to with considerable
interest. The _Washington_ and _Hermann_ sail regularly between Bremen
and Southampton and New York, and the _British Queen_ has been put on
the passage between Hamburg and New York. All these enterprises seem to
indicate that ere long the Atlantic carrying trade will be conducted in
steam-ships, and sailing vessels superseded to as great extent as has
been the case in the coasting trade.

FOOTNOTES:

[25] The _Atlantic_ has just made the passage direct in ten days and
sixteen hours.

[From Sharpe's Magazine]

THE LITTLE HERO OF HAARLEM.

At an early period in the history of Holland, a boy was born in Haarlem,
a town remarkable for its variety of fortune in war, but happily still
more so for its manufactures and inventions in peace. His father was a
_sluicer_--that is, one whose employment it was to open and shut the
sluices, or large oak-gates which, placed at certain regular distances,
close the entrance of the canals, and secure Holland from the danger to
which it seems exposed, of finding itself under water, rather than above
it. When water is wanted, the sluicer raises the sluices more or less,
as required, as a cook turns the cock of a fountain, and closes them
again carefully at night; otherwise the water