bottle from which they had imbibed too freely
contained a villainous compound that ensured their host a handsome
profit, set their brains afire, and degraded them to the level of the
beast. Not that their condition in life was much better than that of the
dumb brute. Animals often enjoy more creature comforts, are better
housed and more kindly treated.

They were not really sailors, for in their long experience on the high
seas they had never reefed a sail or hauled on a rope. Only too often
they never got so much as a glimpse of God's blue sky or the immense
stretches of tumbling, foaming ocean. They were the galley-slaves of
modern seagoing--the stokers, the men with oily skin and heat-bleared
eyes, who toil naked in the bowels of the giant steamship, each crew
doing its "watch" of four hours in a dark pit at the bottom of the huge
vessel, deprived of air and sunlight, firemen and trimmers working
feverishly in a maddening temperature of 140 degrees and over, thrusting
and pulling with rod and rake in the insatiable maw of the raging
furnace. The hot blasts scorch the men's faces and blister their skins,
yet they are compelled to keep up the furious pace. They must never
slacken, for on their muscles and their nerves depend the speed of the
ship and the prestige of the line. So they shovel faster and faster,
tirelessly, endlessly, the flying coal-dust settling on their sweating
faces and bare bodies until they lose semblance to anything human and
recall those lurid pictures of the Inferno in which Satan's imps, armed
with pitch-forks, thrust back shrieking sinners, condemned to
everlasting torment, who are struggling to escape from the bottomless
pit. That the luxurious liner may break a record and retain the
patronage of the millionaire passengers reclining indolently on the
promenade-decks above, the unknown, unseen slaves in the hellish
regions below must shovel, shovel, shovel, always faster, faster until
at last nature gives way. Exhausted by fatigue, overcome by the killing
heat, the man falls headlong. They pick him up and carry him on deck,
where the pure air may or may not revive him. Perhaps he is already
dead. His filthy, almost unearthly appearance chills the sympathies of
the fastidious cabin passengers. Who is he? What's happened? "Only a
stoker!" yawns some one, and all go unconcernedly down to dinner.

* * * * *

The time passed and the men still loafed in the chandler'