Classified_ad

The two Küssian engineers who fastened a torpedo vinder the bow of a Turkish monitor in tlie Danube, and, on their retiim to the northern bank, discharged it by ineans of an electric battery and destroyed the vessel have taken a hint from Lieut. Wm. B. Cushing's exploit in the Roanoke. He slipped up the river in a steam launck mulera flerce flre from the Confedérate ram Albemarie, which was lying in her doek behind a barricade of logs. He lowered a torpedo-boat, rowed it Up to the Albemarie, and fired it. The ram went down like a stone. At the same instant one of the enemy's shots erashed through the torpedo-boat and utterly destroyed it, and the launch was also disabled ; but, Cushing, calling upon his men to save themselves as best they ootlld, dropped into the water, swam down stream half a mile, crawled out at daybreak to hide himself in a swamp, and ñnally found a skiff and escaped to the Federal tíeet. The Bussian engineers rowed ashore and callea electricity to their aid ; Cushing had no such luck. Torpedoes were not used to any exteat during the American war. The iron Tecuniseh was shattered to fragmenta in Mobile liarbor by one of these deadly implements, At the siege of Charleston a monitor stood in so cloe to Fort Sumter that for twenty minutes she lay immediately above a large Confedérate torpedo, connected by wires with a magnetic battery on shore. The electric fluid was shot nlong the wires until they were red-hot ; but the torpedo failed to"explode, and it was subsequently found that a cart had passed over the wires while they were exposed npon the sand fringing the seacoast, !i;id that their power to convey eleotri'iity wns thereby neutralized. -