eave of
the sea made the frames try to open. "Come back to your bearings, you
slack-jawed irons!"

"Rigidity! Rigidity! Rigidity!" thumped the engines. "Absolute,
unvarying rigidity--rigidity!"

"You see!" whined the rivets, in chorus. "No two of you will ever pull
alike, and--and you blame it all on us. We only know how to go through
a plate and bite down on both sides so that it can't, and mustn't, and
sha'n't move."

"I've got one fraction of an inch play, at any rate," said the
garboard-strake, triumphantly. So he had, and all the bottom of the ship
felt the easier for it.

"Then we're no good," sobbed the bottom rivets. "We were ordered--we
were ordered--never to give; and we've given, and the sea will come
in, and we'll all go to the bottom together! First we're blamed for
everything unpleasant, and now we haven't the consolation of having done
our work."

"Don't say I told you," whispered the Steam, consolingly; "but, between
you and me and the last cloud I came from, it was bound to happen sooner
or later. You had to give a fraction, and you've given without knowing
it. Now, hold on, as before."

"What's the use?" a few hundred rivets chattered. "We've given--we've
given; and the sooner we confess that we can't keep the ship together,
and go off our little heads, the easier it will be. No rivet forged can
stand this strain."

"No one rivet was ever meant to. Share it among you," the Steam
answered.

"The others can have my share. I'm going to pull out," said a rivet in
one of the forward plates.

"If you go, others will follow," hissed the Steam. "There's nothing so
contagious in a boat as rivets going. Why, I knew a little chap like
you--he was an eighth of an inch fatter, though--on a steamer--to be
sure, she was only twelve hundred tons, now I come to think of it in
exactly the same place as you are. He pulled out in a bit of a bobble
of a sea, not half as bad as this, and he started all his friends on the
same butt-strap, and the plates opened like a furnace door, and I had to
climb into the nearest fog-bank, while the boat went down."

"Now that's peculiarly disgraceful," said the rivet. "Fatter than me,
was he, and in a steamer not half our tonnage? Reedy little peg! I blush
for the family, sir." He settled himself more firmly than ever in his
place, and the Steam chuckled.

"You see," he went on, quite gravely, "a rivet, and especially a rivet
in your position, is really the one indispensa