You may remember one of the stories in Lear's book of Nonsense Songs.
"They went to sea in a sieve, they did,
In a sieve they went to sea:
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter's morn, on a stormy day,
In a sieve they went to sea.
* * * * *
"They sailed away in a sieve, they did,
In a sieve they sailed so fast,
With only a beautiful pea-green veil,
Tied with a riband by way of a sail,
To a small tobacco-pipe mast;"
And so on. You see that it is quite possible to go to sea in a sieve—that is, if the sieve is large enough and the water is not too rough—and that the above lines are now realized in every particular (Fig. 6).
Fig. 6.
I may give one more example of the power of this elastic skin of water. If you wish to pour water from a tumbler into a narrow-necked bottle, you know how if you pour slowly it nearly all runs down the side of the glass and gets spilled about, whereas if you pour quickly there is no room for the great quantity of water to pass into the bottle all at once, and so it gets spilled again. But if you take a piece of stick or a glass rod, and hold it against the edge of the tumbler, then the water runs down the rod and into the bottle, and none is lost (Fig. 7); you may even hold the rod inclined to one side, as I am now doing, but the water runs down the wet rod because this elastic skin forms a kind of tube which prevents the water from escaping. This action is often made use of in the country to carry the water from the gutters under the roof into a water-butt below. A piece of stick does nearly as well as an iron pipe, and it does not cost anything like so much.
Fig. 7.