en thing go round,' he said.

"'It's all right, General,' said the Bishop. 'I have brought a plumber.'

"For the next few minutes my professional interest absorbed all my
faculties. I laid out my instruments upon a board, tapped the boiler
with a small hammer, tested the feed-tube, and in a few moments had made
what I was convinced was a correct diagnosis of the trouble.

"But here I encountered the greatest professional dilemma in which I
have ever been placed. There was nothing wrong with the boiler at all.
It connected, as I ascertained at once by a thermo-dynamic valvular
test, with the furnace (in fact, I could see it did), and the furnace
quite evidently had been allowed to go out.

"What was I to do? If I told them this, I broke every professional rule
of our union. If the thing became known I should probably be disbarred
and lose my overalls for it. It was my plain professional duty to take a
large hammer and knock holes in the boiler with it, smash up the furnace
pipes, start a leak of gas, and then call in three or more of my
colleagues.

"But somehow I couldn't find it in my heart to do it. The thought of the
girl's appealing face arose before me.

"'How long has this trouble been going on?' I asked sternly.

"'Quite a time,' answered the Bishop. 'It began, did it not, General,
the same day that the confounded furnace went out? The General here and
Admiral Hay and I have been working at it for three days.'

"'Well, gentlemen,' I said, 'I don't want to read you a lesson on your
own ineptitude, and I don't suppose you would understand it if I did.
But don't you see that the whole trouble is _because_ you let the
furnace out? The boiler itself is all right, but you see, gents, it
feeds off the furnace.'

"'Ah,' said the Bishop in a deep melodious tone, 'it feeds off the
furnace. Now that is most interesting. Let me repeat that; I must try to
remember it; it feeds _off_ the furnace. Just so.'

"The upshot was that in twenty minutes we had the whole thing put to
rights. I set the General breaking up boxes and had the Bishop rake out
the clinkers, and very soon we had the furnace going and the boiler in
operation.

"'But now tell me,' said the Bishop, 'suppose one wanted to let the
furnace out--suppose, I mean to say, that it was summer-time, and
suppose one rather felt that one didn't care about a furnace and yet one
wanted one's boiler going for one's hot water, and that sort of thing,
what would one