tween two projecting boulders--"I'd like to make `my
Lords' of the Admiralty do the goose-step regularly here for four hours
a day; and then, perhaps, there'd be a chance of a poor creature being
enabled to walk about the place in comfort!"

Notwithstanding the instruments of torture in the shape of paving-stones
of which the Captain complained, and justly, he and Bob just managed to
reach the _Archimedes_ before she cast-off from the jetty alongside of
which she had been coaling, the two only having time to jump on board as
the gangway connecting her with the shore was withdrawn. Another moment
and they would have been too late; for "time and tide," and ships going
out on trial, wait for no man, or boy either.

However, there they were, "better late than never," Bob thought, and he
thought further, too, as he gazed round the deck of the ironclad, which
was somewhat begrimed with coal-dust, and about the ugliest and most
mis-shapen monster imaginable, "Can I really be on board a ship?"

He was, though; and, presently, the sound of the escape steam, that had
previously been roaring up through the rattling funnels, ceased; while
the fan-blades of the screw-propeller began to revolve, surging up the
water of the open dock in which the vessel lay into a mass of foam, and
creating, so to speak, a sort of "tempest in a teapot."

Then, a couple of attendant tugs sent their tow-ropes aboard, so as to
check and guide the unwieldy leviathan in her progress through the
deeper channels of the harbour which ships of heavy draught have to take
to get out to sea; and "going easy," little by little, with an
occasional stop, as some impertinent craft or other got into the
fairway, they finally reached Spithead.

"What is that funny red vessel coming down to us for?" inquired Bob,
pointing out a dandy-rigged yawl that just then rounded-up under the
stern of the _Archimedes_, laying-to a little way off. "She's coming
alongside, I think."

"That's the powder-hoy," replied the Captain. "She's brought the
ammunition for our big guns here."

"And why is she painted red?" asked Bob again--"eh?"

"Just for the same reason that danger-signals on railways and warning
flags are always red," said the other. "I suppose because the colour is
more glaring and likely to be taken notice of; and no doubt, too, that's
why our soldiers are clothed in scarlet so that they can be all the more
readily potted by the enemy?"

"You are pretty right