head."

"Tell that to the shipwrights. You've been in position for months and
you've never wriggled like this before. If you are n't careful you'll
strain _us_."

"Talking of strain," said a low, rasping, unpleasant voice, "are any
of you fellows--you deck-beams, we mean--aware that those exceedingly
ugly knees of yours happen to be riveted into our structure--_ours_?"

"Who might you be?" the deck-beams inquired.

"Oh, nobody in particular," was the answer. "We're only the port and
starboard upper-deck stringers; and if you persist in heaving and
hiking like this, we shall be reluctantly compelled to take steps."

Now the stringers of the ship are long iron girders, so to speak, that
run lengthways from stern to bow. They keep the iron frames (what are
called ribs in a wooden ship) in place, and also help to hold the ends
of the deck-beams, which go from side to side of the ship. Stringers
always consider themselves most important, because they are so long.

"You will take steps--will you?" This was a long echoing rumble. It
came from the frames--scores and scores of them, each one about
eighteen inches distant from the next, and each riveted to the
stringers in four places. "We think you will have a certain amount of
trouble in _that_;" and thousands and thousands of the little rivets
that held everything together whispered: "You will. You will! Stop
quivering and be quiet. Hold on, brethren! Hold on! Hot Punches!
What's that?"

Rivets have no teeth, so they cannot chatter with fright; but they did
their best as a fluttering jar swept along the ship from stern to bow,
and she shook like a rat in a terrier's mouth.

An unusually severe pitch, for the sea was rising, had lifted the big
throbbing screw nearly to the surface, and it was spinning round in a
kind of soda-water--half sea and half air--going much faster than was
proper, because there was no deep water for it to work in. As it sank
again, the engines--and they were triple expansion, three cylinders in
a row--snorted through all their three pistons, "Was that a joke, you
fellow outside? It's an uncommonly poor one. How are we to do our work
if you fly off the handle that way?"

"I did n't fly off the handle," said the screw, twirling huskily at
the end of the screw-shaft. "If I had, you'd have been scrap-iron by
this time. The sea dropped away from under me, and I had nothing to
catch on to. That's all."

"That's all, d'you call it?" said the thrus