is
roll off and turn to!" Well, that is just what he would get at sea. In
most steamers the engineer walks out of the mess-room, bathroom, or
berth, into an alley-way on either side of the engine platform. The
beat of the engines becomes part of his environment. He sleeps with it
pulsing in his ears, so that if she slows or stops he opens his eyes.
When I go up at four o'clock and call the Second Engineer, he will
stretch, yawn, half open one eye, and mutter, "What's the steam?"

To keep him awake I retail some piece of current engine gossip.
"After-bilge pump jibbed at three o'clock," I say. "Aw ri' now?" he
asks. "Yes, aw ri' now," I answer. "You'll have to watch the M.P.
guide though--she's warm." Then, remarking that the after-well is dry,
and that I've got plenty of water in the boilers for him, I leave him
and go below till he relieves me. It is a point of honour among us to
know every kink and crotchet of day-to-day working. If a joint starts
"blowing" ever so little away up in some obscure corner of our
kingdom, we know of it within an hour or two. One would think we
were a mothers' meeting discussing our babies, to hear the grave
tittle-tattle concerning the inevitable weakness of babies and engines
which passes over the mess-room table.

Now come with me along the tunnel, then, to the end of the world.
A narrow, sliding water-tight door in the bulkhead here, under the
shadow of the thrust-block--elegance in design, you will observe,
being strictly subordinated to use. Follow carefully now, and leave
that shaft alone. It will not help you at all if you slip. The music
has died away, only a solemn _clonk-clonk--clonk-clonk_ reverberates
through this narrow, Norman-arched catacomb. At length we emerge into
a larger vaulted chamber, where the air is singularly fresh--but I
forgot. I am not writing a smugglers' cave story. We are under an
air-shaft running up to the poop-deck, and we may go no further. The
fourteen-inch shaft disappears through a gland, and, just beyond that
is the eighteen-foot propeller whirling in the blue ocean water. Here,
for us, is the great First Cause. Of the illimitable worlds of marine
flora and fauna outside these riveted steel walls the sailor-man knows
nothing and cares less. What are called "the wonders of the deep" have
no part in the life of the greatest wonder of the deep--the seaman.

And when the propeller drops away, as it does sometimes--drops "_down
to the dark, to the ut