it was
mixed with dirty water. "Help! Oiler! Fitter! Stoker! Help I'm choking,"
it gasped. "Never in the history of maritime invention has such a
calamity over-taken one so young and strong. And if I go, who's to drive
the ship?"

"Hush! oh, hush!" whispered the Steam, who, of course, had been to sea
many times before. He used to spend his leisure ashore in a cloud, or
a gutter, or a flower-pot, or a thunder-storm, or anywhere else where
water was needed. "That's only a little priming, a little carrying-over,
as they call it. It'll happen all night, on and off. I don't say it's
nice, but it's the best we can do under the circumstances."

"What difference can circumstances make? I'm here to do my work--on
clean, dry steam. Blow circumstances!" the cylinder roared.

"The circumstances will attend to the blowing. I've worked on the North
Atlantic run a good many times--it's going to be rough before morning."

"It isn't distressingly calm now," said the extra strong frames--they
were called web-frames--in the engine-room. "There's an upward thrust
that we don't understand, and there's a twist that is very bad for our
brackets and diamond-plates, and there's a sort of west-northwesterly
pull, that follows the twist, which seriously annoys us. We mention this
because we happened to cost a good deal of money, and we feel sure that
the owner would not approve of our being treated in this frivolous way."

"I'm afraid the matter is out of owner's hands for the present," said
the Steam, slipping into the condenser. "You're left to your own devices
till the weather betters."

"I wouldn't mind the weather," said a flat bass voice below; "it's this
confounded cargo that's breaking my heart. I'm the garboard-strake,
and I'm twice as thick as most of the others, and I ought to know
something."

The garboard-strake is the lowest plate in the bottom of a ship, and
the Dimbula's garboard-strake was nearly three-quarters of an inch mild
steel.

"The sea pushes me up in a way I should never have expected," the strake
grunted, "and the cargo pushes me down, and, between the two, I don't
know what I'm supposed to do."

"When in doubt, hold on," rumbled the Steam, making head in the boilers.

"Yes; but there's only dark, and cold, and hurry, down here; and how
do I know whether the other plates are doing their duty? Those
bulwark-plates up above, I've heard, ain't more than five-sixteenths of
an inch thick--scandalous, I call it."