Another curious vessel was finished last June, and lay at a private wharf in Virginia for some time. She was named the Howard Cassard and nicknamed the "Razor-back." With a length of 222 feet, she had only 16 feet beam. Her equilibrium was maintained by an extremely heavy keel and some 50,000 pounds of machinery below the water-line.
The razorlike sharpness of the boat gave it a curious look, and it was expected that when moving through the water the sharp prow would cut it like a knife, thus reducing the resistance to a minimum. The narrowness of her beam necessitated some economy in her interior arrangements, but this was successfully overcome by adopting somewhat the idea of a sleeping-car. But the Howard Cassard was an experiment that evidently has not been successful, as the claim of the designer to cross the ocean in three-fifths of the time now required has as yet not been fulfilled by his odd craft.
Probably one of the strangest ideas in marine construction was that of the man who proposed placing in the stern of a vessel a number of compressed-air cannons. These were to be fired one after the other, the force of the air striking the water and driving the vessel forward. Somewhat similar is the idea of another engineer and inventor. It is to run a series of hollow pipes through the entire length of the keel. The pipes are to receive the water at the bow and carry it to the centre of the vessel, where it is shut off. Then a powerful pressure of compressed air is brought into play, and the separated body of water is shot out of the pipe in the stern, the power of the contact driving the vessel forward. As the water is to be received and discharged alternately, there would be no jerking motion.
[OUR ROMAN TWINS.]
BY OLIVE MAY EAGER.
THE ROMAN TWINS.
When the twins were born in Rome, all of our friends exclaimed at once, "Oh, Romulus and Remus!" but we did not name them for the city's twin founders. One reason was that one of our babies was a girl, and although we might have called her Romola, we could not make up our minds to name the dear little brother in honor of that ill-natured Remus. So notwithstanding their classic birthplace, our twins answer to common, every-day names.
We lived at the foot of the Capitol, within a stone's-throw of the Roman Forum, around which clusters so much of legend and history. The nursery window overlooked the Capitol garden, where two wolves were always stalking restlessly about in their cages. Before our twins knew a word of English, and almost as soon as they could lisp in sweet Italian accents, they heard the tale of Romulus and Remus, and knew that the great city of Rome honored this legend by keeping two live wolves at the Capitol.