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America Fallen

the entrance to Guantanamo Bay and swung around to the eastward, from my station, 120 feet above the sea, I gazed with no little pride at the two divisions of dreadnoughts strung out astern, ship beyond ship at 500-yard intervals, in a stately column which covered some three miles of water.

Below me was the flagship, fresh from the builders' hands. Seen from above, she looked wonderfully like those deck-plan drawings which I had studied in the naval annuals. Forward was the new type of 3-gun turret, with its long, lean 14-inch guns looking for all the world like Brobdingnagian lead pencils. Abaft of it was turret No. 2, with its pair of guns reaching clear across the roof of turret No. 1. Astern I looked down into the yawning mouth of our huge single smokestack. Not so much as a wraith of tell-tale smoke drifted from its edge; merely the shimmer