"Yes, sir!" said Ned. "They spend all their money, and are glad to get back. They say the English can whip anything in all the world except Americans. I'm going there, some day. I don't believe there is any British ship that can whip the Kentucky."
"She certainly is magnificent," replied his uncle. "She is a tremendous war machine. What we are ever to do with her, however, I don't care to think of. I want her never to fire one of those guns. After all, Ned, if one of her great steel bottom plates should get shaken loose and drop out, that vast leviathan would sink, with all on board."
"I guess not," said Ned. "They would get away in the boats. Besides, she isn't going to fall to pieces right away."
"All right," said his uncle. "We've seen her. Now let's go home."
They turned away and walked on across what the people of New York call the Battery. They do so because here was a fort once. Part of it, nearest the water, was made there two centuries ago. Another part, more like a modern fort, was made later, and it was distinguished for having been surrendered, back and forth, without firing one of its guns in defence, more times than any other military post in America. It was given up once by the Dutch, twice by the British, and once by the Americans. That was by General Washington, when the English troops drove him and his ragged rebels out of New York. None of the fighting that was done then was anywhere near the Battery.
Ned had something to say about that, as they went along, and about the other forts around the harbour, of which he seemed to be very proud.
"My boy," remarked his uncle, "almost all of our New York forts are back numbers. One steel canoe like the Kentucky, if she were English, for instance, and if we were conquering England, could knock all of those old-fashioned affairs about our ears."
"Well," said Ned, doubtfully, "so the Kentucky or the Oregon could do for any old fort in Europe. I say, Uncle Jack, right here is the lower end of all the elevated railways."
"Exactly," said his uncle; "and of the cable-cars that are hauled by a steel rope underground. Away up yonder is the suspension bridge from this city to Brooklyn. There will be a dozen of them, more or less, before long. All over the upper part of town the trolley-cars run by lightning on a string. I hate all these modern inventions and innovations—I do! I hate railways up in the air on stilts, and I hate express trains that go a mile a minute, and I hate these electric lights. Why, Ned, when I was a boy, we were able to get first-rate tallow-dip candles to read by. Nobody can have anything of that kind, nowadays. Now, just look at those forty-story-chimney buildings! Fellows who live at the top of those things have to be shot up. It's awful!"