it.
It'll happen all night, on and off. I don't say it's nice, but it's
the best we can do under the circumstances."

"What difference can circumstances make? I'm here to do my work--on
clean, dry steam. Blow circumstances!" the cylinder roared.

"The circumstances will attend to the blowing. I've worked on the
North Atlantic run a good many times--it's going to be rough before
morning."

"It isn't distressingly calm now," said the extra strong frames, they
were called web frames, in the engine room. "There's an upward thrust
that we don't understand, and there's a twist that is very bad for our
brackets and diamond plates, and there's a sort of northwestward pull
that follows the twist, which seriously annoys us. We mention this
because _we_ happened to cost a great deal of money, and we feel
sure that the owner would not approve of our being treated in this
frivolous way."

"I'm afraid the matter's out of the owner's hands for the present,"
said the steam, slipping into the condenser. "You're left to your own
devices till the weather betters."

"I wouldn't mind the weather," said a flat bass voice deep below;
"it's this confounded cargo that's breaking my heart. I'm the garboard
strake, and I'm twice as thick as most of the others, and I ought to
know something."

The garboard strake is the very bottom-most plate in the bottom of
a ship, and the "Dimbula's" garboard strake (she was a flat-bottomed
boat) was nearly three-quarters of an inch mild steel.

"The sea pushes me up in a way I should never have expected," the
strake went on, "and the cargo pushes me down, and between the two I
don't know what I'm supposed to do."

"When in doubt, hold on," rumbled the steam, making head in the
boilers.

"Yes, but there's only dark and cold and hurry down here, and how do
I know whether the other plates are doing their duty? Those bulwark
plates up above, I've heard, aren't more than five-sixteenths of an
inch thick--scandalous, I call it."

"I agree with you," said a huge web frame by the main cargo hatch. He
was deeper and thicker than all the others, and curved half-way across
the ship's side in the shape of half an arch, to support the deck
where deck beams would have been in the way of cargo coming up and
down. "I work entirely unsupported, and I observe that I am the
sole strength of this vessel, so far as my vision extends. The
responsibility, I assure you, is enormous. I believe the money value
of the ca