nders on the upper deck, and that's a
twelve-pounder forward there by the conning-tower. I forgot to mention
that we're nickel steel, with a coal capacity of sixty tons in most
damnably placed bunkers, and that thirty and a quarter knots is about our
top. Care to come aboard?_"

But the voice was speaking still more rapidly and feverishly, as if to
fill a silence with no matter what, and the shape that was uttering it
was straining forward anxiously over the rail.

"_Ugh! But I'm glad this happened in the daylight,_" another voice was
muttering.

"I wish I was sure it was happening at all.... Poor old spook!"

"I suppose it would keep its feet if her deck was quite vertical. Think
she'll go down, or just melt?"

"Kind of go down ... without wash...."

"Listen--here's the other one now--"

For Bligh was singing again:

"For, Lord, Thou know'st our nature such
If we great things obtain,
And in the getting of the same
Do feel no grief or pain,

"We little do esteem thereof;
But, hardly brought to pass,
A thousand times we do esteem
More than the other was."

_"But oh, look--look--look at the other!... Oh, I say, wasn't he a grand
old boy! Look!"_

For, transfiguring Abel Reeling's form as a prophet's form is
transfigured in the instant of his rapture, flooding his brain with the
white eureka-light of perfect knowledge, that for which he and his dream
had been at a standstill had come. He knew her, this ship of the future,
as if God's Finger had bitten her lines into his brain. He knew her as
those already sinking into the grave know things, miraculously,
completely, accepting Life's impossibilities with a nodded "Of course."
From the ardent mouths of her eight furnaces to the last drip from her
lubricators, from her bed-plates to the breeches of her quick-firers, he
knew her--read her gauges, thumbed her bearings, gave the ranges from her
range-finders, and lived the life he lived who was in command of her. And
he would not forget on the morrow, as he had forgotten on many morrows,
for at last he had seen the water about his feet, and knew that there
would be no morrow for him in this world....

And even in that moment, with but a sand or two to run in his glass,
indomitable, insatiable, dreaming dream on dream, he could not die until
he knew more. He had two questions to ask, and a master-question; and but
a moment remained. Sharply his voice rang out.

"Ho, there!... This ancient ship, the _Ma