hail storm. Talk about your coast defence; they heaved everything at
us from bad names to railroad iron, and we lost all our window glass
the first clatter, while the smoke stack looked like a pretzel with
cramps.

"When we scraped through I looked back with pity at the 'Detroit's'
crew. She hadn't any wheel house, and the helmsman was due to get
all the attention that was comin' to him. They'd built up a
barricade of potato sacks, chicken coops and bic-a-brac around the
wheel that protected 'em somewhat, but even while I watched, some
Polack filtered a brick through and laid out the quartermaster cold,
and he was drug off. Oh! it was refined and esthetic.

"Well, we run the gauntlet, presented every block with stuff rangin'
in tensile strength from insults to asphalt pavements, and
noise!--say, all the racket in the world was a whisper. I caught a
glimpse of the old man leanin' out of the pilot house, where a window
had been, his white hair bristly, and his nostrils h'isted,
embellishin' the air with surprisin' flights of gleeful profanity.

"'Hooray! this is livin' he yells, spyin' me shovelin' the deck out
from under the junk. 'Best scrap I've had in years,' and just then
some baseball player throwed in from centre field, catching him in
the neck with a tomato. Gee! that man's an honour to the faculty of
speech.

"I was doin' bully till a cobble-stone bounced into the engine room,
makin' a billiard with my off knee, then I got kind of peevish.

"Rush Street Bridge is the last one, and they'd massed there on both