r water by the power of her storage-batteries alone.
And soon she went at that. And no mild racket inside her then; for a
sub's engine power and space are out of all proportion to her tonnage.
Not to decrease the noise, the man to whom the trial meant most was
standing by with a stop-watch, and every half-minute or so he would yell
at the top of his lungs, "Go!" or "Hold!" to the engineer, who was
imprisoned in a narrow alleyway with engines to right and to left and
below him. The engineer would look at a register and yell back at the
manager, who would then set some figures in a book and rush over to the
man who was reckoning up the decreasing or increasing amperes or
kilowatts or whatever they were of her storage-batteries, and set down
more figures; and if the boss had to yell his head off to make himself
heard, be sure that the others had to yell even louder. Only on trial
trips, probably, where tests have to be proved, does all this yelling
happen; but the total effect was to make a shore-goer feel, not as if
he were in a ship under water, but rather in a subway section under
construction, or some overdriven corner of some sort of night-working
machine-shop, or some other homelike place ashore. The bright electric
lights helped out the machine-shop illusion.

For a time during the run the diving-rudder man had his troubles keeping
her on a level, whereupon the skipper--an easy-going man ordinarily--jerked
his head away from his periscope and had a peek for the reason. Through
the forward bulkhead door he spied the torpedo man, who, feeling pleased,
perhaps, at the successful execution of his part of the programme, was
fox-trotting fore and aft for himself in his section of the ship. "Would
you mind picking out one spot and staying on it?" asked the skipper, at
which the torpedo man took his camp-stool, picked out his one spot, and
planted himself on it, and piously read the stock-market quotations of a
week-old newspaper for the rest of the run.

While this hour run--full speed, submerged--was in progress, a tickling
in our throats set most of us to coughing. A naval constructor of note,
who was also a shark on chemistry, explained how this coughing was not
caused by the chill in the air, but by the particles of sulphuric acid
thrown off by the action of the storage-batteries. These little particles,
it seems, went travelling about in the air seeking a home--some place,
any place where they could tuck in out of the