what happens?

_Candidate._ The mercury in the barometer subsides.

_Examiner (purple with disgust)._ You silly idiot, if you were sitting
on a table and I knocked you off, would _you_ subside?

Bicker was about to put in a reminiscence of his at this point, but
Meacock was already giving another instance of this examiner's zeal for
pure English.

_Examiner (producing a piece of wood)._ What colour's this?

_Candidate._ Chocolate.

_Examiner (purple once more)._ Chocolate! Chocolate be dam'd. Chocolate's
something to eat--What COLOUR is it?

The chief engineer, seeing me somewhat handicapped by temperament from
wandering about as inquisitively as I ought to have done, came up one
afternoon to take me into "_his_ little slice of the ship." I am sorry
to think how vague my imagination and how inactive my gratitude had been
up to that first descent down the iron stairways and crossings to the
engine-room. The stifling air and the throbbing roar, of course, kept
my notions vague, but the degree of vagueness was not so disgraceful as
it had been. He pointed out all things to one comprehending scarcely
anything, except a chalk legend on the wall which ran:

Aston Villa
Celtic
Manchester U,

and so on, which I noticed for myself. The ruling passion--(passion at
the referee's ruling, says the cynic).

I was aware, meanwhile, of vast steel rods and arms in violent motion,
named severally by the chief in a mighty voice, which nevertheless
was too much of a whisper for me. The gangways round them, it was easier
to learn, were narrow and greasy. The cool skill with which an engineer
was anointing these whirling forms, his hand dapping mothlike with the
tapering can above them, was enough to amaze me. Under a strange
construction like a kiln, by way of a low red door, we went into the
vault where the dusky, glowing and actually grinning firemen were
tending the furnaces. (It happens all day, every day in thousands of
ships!) Above, we had looked in at a dark hole--I rightly thought, over
the boilers--and breathed for a moment a most parching element, so that
the heat of the stokehold did not frighten me. The chief introduced me
to the third engineer, Williams--we roared out cordially; and then he
inducted me to the mysteries aft, where, along the shaft which revolves
the propeller, a specially greasy passage runs. Here, as throughout this
cavernous region--I remembered Hedge Street Tunnels, which to the
ini