any
passenger, however gorgeous. A thought salutary for gorgeous
passengers--that they were in the final resort mere fool bodies to be
controlled! After I had seen the countless store-rooms, in the recesses
of each of which was hidden a clerk with a pen behind his ear and a
nervous and taciturn air, and passed on to the world of the second
cabin, which was a surprisingly brilliant imitation of the great world
of the saloon, I found that I held a much-diminished opinion of the
great world of the saloon, which I now perceived to be naught but a thin
crust or artificial gewgaw stuck over the truly thrilling parts of the
ship.

It was not, however, till the next day that I realized what the most
thrilling part of the ship was. Under the protection of another high
officer I had climbed to the bridge--seventy-five feet above the level
of the sea--which bridge had been very seriously disestablished by an
ambitious wave a couple of years before--and had there inspected the
devices for detecting and extinguishing fires in distant holds by merely
turning a handle, and the charts and the telephones and the telegraphs,
and the under-water signaling, and the sounding-tubes, and the officers'
piano; and I had descended by way of the capstan-gear (which, being
capable of snapping a chain that would hold two hundred and sixty tons
in suspension, was suitably imprisoned in a cage, like a fierce wild
animal) right through the length of the vessel to the wheel-house aft.
It was comforting to know that if six alternative steering-wheels were
smashed, one after another, there remained a seventh gear to be worked,
chiefly by direct force of human arm. And, after descending several more
stories, I had seen the actual steering--the tremendous affair moving to
and fro, majestic and apparently capricious, in obedience to the light
touch of a sailor six hundred feet distant. And then I had seen the four
shafts, revolving lazily one hundred and eighty-four to the minute; and
got myself involved in dangerous forests of greasy machinery, whizzing
all deserted in a very high temperature under electric bulbs. Only at
rare intervals did I come across a man in brown doing nothing in
particular--as often as not gazing at a dial; there were dials
everywhere, showing pressures and speeds. And then I had come to the
dynamo-room, where the revolutions were twelve hundred to the minute,
and then to the turbines themselves--insignificant little things, with