o be evolved. Yet such are
the traditions of the sea, such is the power of those traditions and the
spirit of those who interpret them, that some of these men--not all, but
some--remained down in the _Titanic's_ stokeholds long after she had
struck, and long after the water, pouring like a cataract through the
rent in her bottom and rising like a tide round the black holes where
they worked, had warned them that her doom, and probably theirs, was
sealed.

In the engine-room were another group of heroes, men of a far higher
type, with fine intelligences, trained in all the subtleties and craft
of modern ships, men with education and imagination who could see in
their mind's eye all the variations of horror that might await them.
These men also continued at their routine tasks in the engine room,
knowing perfectly well that no power on earth could save them, choosing
to stay there while there was work to be done for the common good, their
best hope being presently to be drowned instead of being boiled or
scalded to death. All through the ship, though in less awful
circumstances, the same spirit was being observed; men who had duties to
do went on doing them because they were the kind of men to whom in such
an hour it came more easily to perform than to shirk their duties. The
three ship's boys spent the whole of that hour carrying provisions from
the store-room to the deck; the post-office employes worked in the
flooded mail-room below to save the mail-bags and carry them up to where
they might be taken off if there should be a chance; the purser and his
men brought up the ship's books and money, against all possibility of
its being any use to do so, but because it was their duty at such a time
to do so; the stewards were busy to the end with their domestic, and the
officers with their executive, duties. In all this we have an example of
spontaneous discipline--for they had never been drilled in doing these
things, they only knew that they had to do them--such as no barrack-room
discipline in the world could match. In such moments all artificial
bonds are useless. It is what men are in themselves that determines
their conduct; and discipline and conduct like this are proofs, not of
the superiority of one race over another, but that in the core of human
nature itself there is an abiding sweetness and soundness that fear
cannot embitter nor death corrupt.

* * * * *

The twin gray horses ar