ll be in dock the night, and when you're goin' back to
Glasgie ye can think of us loadin' her down an' drivin' her forth--all
for your sake."

In the next few days they stowed some four thousand tons' dead weight
into the _Dimbula_, and took her out from Liverpool. As soon as she
met the lift of the open water, she naturally began to talk. If you
lay your ear to the side of the cabin next time you are in a steamer,
you will hear hundreds of little voices in every direction, thrilling
and buzzing, and whispering and popping, and gurgling and sobbing and
squeaking exactly like a telephone in a thunder-storm. Wooden ships
shriek and growl and grunt, but iron vessels throb and quiver through
all their hundreds of ribs and thousands of rivets. The _Dimbula_ was
very strongly built, and every piece of her had a letter or number, or
both, to describe it; and every piece had been hammered, or forged,
or rolled, or punched by man, and had lived in the roar and rattle of
the shipyard for months. Therefore, every piece had its own separate
voice in exact proportion to the amount of trouble spent upon it.
Cast-iron as a rule, says very little; but mild steel plates and
wrought-iron, and ribs and beams that have been much bent and welded
and riveted, talk continuously. Their conversation, of course, is not
half as wise as our human talk, because they are all, though they do
not know it, bound down one to the other in a black darkness, where
they cannot tell what is happening near them, nor what will overtake
them next.

As soon as she had cleared the Irish coast a sullen gray-headed old
wave of the Atlantic climbed leisurely over her straight bows, and sat
down on her steam-capstan used for hauling up the anchor. Now the
capstan and the engine that drove it had been newly painted red and
green; besides which, nobody likes being ducked.

"Don't you do that again," the capstan sputtered through the teeth of
his cogs. "Hi! Where's the fellow gone?"

The wave had slouched overside with a plop and a chuckle; but "Plenty
more where he came from," said a brother-wave, and went through and
over the capstan, who was bolted firmly to an iron plate on the iron
deck-beams below.

"Can't you keep still up there?" said the deck-beams. "What's the
matter with you? One minute you weigh twice as much as you ought to,
and the next you don't!"

"It is n't my fault," said the capstan. "There's a green brute outside
that comes and hits me on the