Bob meanwhile, with never a thought of Rover, was proceeding across the Dockyard with the Captain, who hobbled painfully over the knobbly paving-stones with which that national institution is ornamented, anathematising at every step he took the rulers of the "Queen's Navee," who put him thus to unnecessary pain. "I can't think how, in a Christian land, people's poor feet should be so mercilessly disregarded!" he exclaimed, on giving his favourite corn an extra pinch between two projecting boulders--"I'd like to make `my Lords' of the Admiralty do the goose-step regularly here for four hours a day; and then, perhaps, there'd be a chance of a poor creature being enabled to walk about the place in comfort!" Notwithstanding the instruments of torture in the shape of paving-stones of which the Captain complained, and justly, he and Bob just managed to reach the _Archimedes_ before she cast-off from the jetty alongside of which she had been coaling, the two only having time to jump on board as the gangway connecting her with the shore was withdrawn. Another moment and they would have been too late; for "time and tide," and ships going out on trial, wait for no man, or boy either. However, there they were, "better late than never," Bob thought, and he thought further, too, as he gazed round the deck of the ironclad, which was somewhat begrimed with coal-dust, and about the ugliest and most mis-shapen monster imaginable, "Can I really be on board a ship?" He was, though; and, presently, the sound of the escape steam, that had previously been roaring up through the rattling funnels, ceased; while the fan-blades of the screw-propeller began to revolve, surging up the water of the open dock in which the vessel lay into a mass of foam, and creating, so to speak, a sort of "tempest in a teapot." Then, a couple of attendant tugs sent their tow-ropes aboard, so as to check and guide the unwieldy leviathan in her progress through the deeper channels of the harbour which ships of heavy draught have to take to get out to sea; and "going easy," little by little, with an occasional stop, as some impertinent craft or other got into the fairway, they finally reached Spithead. "What is that funny red vessel coming down to us for?" inquired Bob, pointing out a dandy-rigged yawl that just then rounded-up under the stern of the _Archimedes_, laying-to a little way off. "She's coming alongside, I think." "That's the powder-hoy," replied the Captain. "She's brought the ammunition for our big guns here." "And why is she painted red?" asked Bob again--"eh?" "Just for the same reason that danger-signals on railways and warning flags are always red," said the other. "I suppose because the colour is more glaring and likely to be taken notice of; and no doubt, too, that's why our soldiers are clothed in scarlet so that they can be all the more readily potted by the enemy?"