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Show CLEOPATRA'S NEEDLE. Setting the Cbelisk Aboard Ship a Pretty Piece of .Engineering. "One of the pleasantest recollection I have to look back on, " said Adam Johnson, "is the fact that I was one of the party that helped to run tip th American colors over Cleopatra's needle When it was being taken down to Le sarried to New York. Our vessel was out in the Mediterranean with a roving commission, and we were at Alexandria tt the time the obelisk was being mov ed. The big stone had been presented by the Egyptian government to this coua-trys coua-trys but the people were wild about having hav-ing it moved. We had to place a guard around the men who were working on the shaft, and even then there was al most a riot "But that was one of the prettiest pieces of engineering work I havo ever seen. The engineers who were moving our shaft had a couple of big wooden cases built that fitted around the needle like the pieces of wood around the lead in a pencil. There were a couple of projectiles pro-jectiles on each side of the casings just on the center of gravity in the shaft, like the trunnions on a cannon. Under these they put lifting jacks and just picked that immense stone off its pedestal, swung it around horizontal and then lowered it as gently as could be on a long sliding way, with cannon balls under' it for rollers. They had a Bquare hole cut in the stern of the steamship and slid it into the hull through that and replaced the sheathing outside. "Under the 6haft in the inside of the pedestal there were a lot of bronze toads and ornaments and the Lord knows what not that the Masons claimed were placed there by some of their progenitors eons ago. I don't know anything about that though, and you can leave it or take it, S3 you choose. "The British were not half so slick with the obelisk they carried over to England. They cased it up in a big sheet iron arrangement like a boiler, riveted riv-eted it in and floated the whole thing off through a trench dug in the sand down to the water. Then they rigged jury sails on it and towed it over to England, but they lost three or four men off it before they got it in port and had all sorts of a time generally. "A couple of years afterward I saw the British obelisk set np on the east bank of the Thames, and when I came home the first thing I went to see was ours in Central park." Washington Post |