Concerning Big Guns

A man who makes thc olaim, boldly and badly, that his ancestor was one of the passengers in Noah's ark entered the car at Cumberland street on Thursday morning-, says the Brooklyn Eag-le. He found a vacant seat beside a smokebegrimed clay pipe, with a red-whiskered man supporting it, pulled out a pamphlet bearing on its cover a disheartening representation of New York and Brooklyn and bursting under the shells of a foe located somewhere down near ííorton's point, and began to make very audible comments on the excellence and accuracy of the picture. He went so far, in fact, as to assert that every country in the world was so well equipped with naval guns that the great metropolitan center of the United States was practically ienseiess. He made no secret of the fact that he got his information from a source that supplies the inhabitants of menageries with news concerning their individual movements, and elaborated the theory that a Peruvian gunboat, with two horse pistols aboard, could knock the palatial public and private buildings of the sister eities into smithereens. The friend and supporter of the clay pipe grew weary and remarked: "Sorra a bit ov it!" "My friend," observed the man with the pamphlet, "you evidently take me for an alarmist. But I am not. I don't believe you've ever seen any of these guns that I refer to. Why, sir- " "Aisy, now," said the passeng-er behind the pipe. "IVe seen more guns in me days than ye ever looked at. How far, now, might that biggest wan ye was referrin' to a short time ae-o shoot?" "Shoot, sir? Twelve miles, sin. Yes, sir, easily twelve , miles, sir. And 'twould knock the new post office into ruins before we knew what we were about." "Twelve miles!" remarked the supporter of the pipe in a tone soscornful that the mustache on á cig-arette smoker on the other side of the car involuntaria curled. "Twelve miles! An' ye cali that a gun?" "Nothing like it, sir. Ship, sir, way out in the bay, can bombard the sugar refineries in the eastern district and clean out Island City." "Ye're gabbin' an' ye're gabbin'," impressively observe'd the critical passenger. "Did ye ever see a gmn, anyway? Talkin' about twelve-mile guns! iiemme teil ye about a gun I saw meself at Dover. D"ye know where Dover is? Over in Ingland forninst the Prineh coast. Well, be all that's sound, I saw a gun there whose aqual can't be found in the worruld. Ye may b'lave it or not, but on the barrel of the cannon was this- an' I'll never forget it: 'Ram me tight and sponge me clane an' I'll send a bulletto Calais grane'- an' that's twenty-one miles acrossthe say."