Because, he said, somebody had told him it was--or at least it ran in his mind that somebody had told him something like that! And when a passenger gave an officer of the garrison copies of the Tribune, the Herald, and Times, he was surprised to find later news in them from Lisbon than he had just received by the little monthly steamer.
He was told that it came by cable.

He said he knew they had tried to lay a cable ten years ago, but it had been in his mind somehow that they hadn't succeeded! It is in communities like this that Jesuit humbuggery flourishes.

We visited a Jesuit cathedral nearly two hundred years old and found in it a piece of the veritable cross upon which our Saviour was crucified.

It was polished and hard, and in as excellent a state of preservation as if the dread tragedy on Calvary had occurred yesterday instead of eighteen centuries ago.

But these confiding people believe in that piece of wood unhesitatingly.
In a chapel of the cathedral is an altar with facings of solid silver--at least they call it so, and I think myself it would go a couple of hundred to the ton (to speak after the fashion of the silver miners)--and before it is kept forever burning a small lamp.