before them.

It is curious that no man knows how the rods were straightened. The
crew of the Haliotis remember that week very dimly, as a fever patient
remembers the delirium of a long night. There were fires everywhere,
they say; the whole ship was one consuming furnace, and the hammers were
never still. Now, there could not have been more than one fire at the
most, for Mr. Wardrop distinctly recalls that no straightening was done
except under his own eye. They remember, too, that for many years voices
gave orders which they obeyed with their bodies, but their minds were
abroad on all the seas. It seems to them that they stood through days
and nights slowly sliding a bar backwards and forwards through a white
glow that was part of the ship. They remember an intolerable noise in
their burning heads from the walls of the stoke-hole, and they remember
being savagely beaten by men whose eyes seemed asleep. When their
shift was over they would draw straight lines in the air, anxiously and
repeatedly, and would question one another in their sleep, crying, "Is
she straight?"

At last--they do not remember whether this was by day or by night--Mr.
Wardrop began to dance clumsily, and wept the while; and they too danced
and wept, and went to sleep twitching all over; and when they woke, men
said that the rods were straightened, and no one did any work for two
days, but lay on the decks and ate fruit. Mr. Wardrop would go below
from time to time, and pat the two rods where they lay, and they heard
him singing hymns.

Then his trouble of mind went from him, and at the end of the third
day's idleness he made a drawing in chalk upon the deck, with letters of
the alphabet at the angles. He pointed out that, though the piston-rod
was more or less straight, the piston-rod cross-head--the thing that
had been jammed sideways in the guides--had been badly strained, and
had cracked the lower end of the piston-rod. He was going to forge and
shrink a wrought-iron collar on the neck of the piston-rod where it
joined the cross-head, and from the collar he would bolt a Y-shaped
piece of iron whose lower arms should be bolted into the cross-head.
If anything more were needed, they could use up the last of the
boiler-plate.

So the forges were lit again, and men burned their bodies, but hardly
felt the pain. The finished connection was not beautiful, but it seemed
strong enough--at least, as strong as the rest of the machinery; and
with tha