in the boilers, machinery and
coal. The coal bunkers were like a lining running round the boilers, not
only at the sides of the ship, but also across her whole breadth, thus
increasing the solidity of the steel bulkheads; and when it is
remembered that her steam was supplied by twenty-nine boilers, each of
them the size of a large room, and fired by a hundred and fifty-nine
furnaces, the enormous weight of this part of the ship may be dimly
realized.

There are two lives lived side by side on such a voyage, the life of the
passengers and the life of the ship. From a place high up on the
boat-deck our traveller can watch the progress of these two lives. The
passengers play games or walk about, or sit idling drowsily in deck
chairs, with their eyes straying constantly from the unheeded book to
the long horizon, or noting the trivial doings of other idlers. The
chatter of their voices, the sound of their games, the faint tinkle of
music floating up from the music-room are eloquent of one of these
double lives; there on the bridge is an expression of the other--the
bridge in all its spick-and-span sanctities, with the officers of the
watch in their trim uniform, the stolid quartermaster at the wheel, and
his equally stolid companion of the watch who dreams his four hours away
on the starboard side of the bridge almost as motionless as the bright
brass binnacles and standards, and the telegraphs that point
unchangeably down to Full Ahead....

The Officer of the watch has a sextant at his eye. One by one the
Captain, the Chief, the Second and the Fourth, all come silently up and
direct their sextants to the horizon. The quartermaster comes and
touches his cap: "Twelve o'clock, Sir." There is silence--a deep sunny
silence, broken only by the low tones of the Captain to the Chief: "What
have you got?" says the Captain. "Thirty," says the Chief,
"Twenty-nine," says the Third. There is another space of sunny silent
seconds; the Captain takes down his sextant. "Make it eight bells," he
says. Four double strokes resound from the bridge and are echoed from
the fo'c'stle head; and the great moment of the day, the moment that
means so much, is over. The officers retire with pencils and papers and
tables of logarithms; the clock on the staircase is put back, and the
day's run posted; from the deck float up the sounds of a waltz and
laughing voices; Time and the world flow on with us again.

V

For anything that the eye cou