Now, Captain Image, as has been hinted, had made the most of the years he had spent sea-going in the matter of picking up a vocabulary; he has to this day brothers in Wales who are local preachers and revivalist leaders, and there is no doubt that he was the inheritor of some ancestral strain of burning eloquence. Carter, on the other hand, though not as a rule a man of much speech, had not lived with Swizzle-Stick Smith all those long months without taking lessons in the art of vituperation, and though he was not conscious of it at the time, the education soaked in, and when the moment of stress arrived his memory served him faithfully. Miss Kate O'Neill heard the discussion and retired to her room below. Stewards popped their heads round doorways and listened appreciatively; deck hands took cover round the angle of the houses and strained their ears, and the second engineer, who was bred on Tyneside and openly claimed to be a connoisseur, came out brazenly onto the top of the fiddley three yards from the speakers and did nothing to an unoffending ventilator cowl with a three-quarter inch spanner. From the present writer's point of view the remarks on both sides had the fatal drawback that their point lay far more in artistic delivery than in their subject matter, and so to report them here verbatim would give a totally unjust idea of their weight and influence. But it must be understood that Captain Image, who never till now had met a foeman so worthy of his tongue, surpassed himself; and Carter, who now for the first time used these winged words in hard vicious earnest, felt all a sportsman's pride in seeing his verbal missiles land and rankle. It is hard to award the victory; and, in plain truth, each orator was so warmed with the effort of his own tongue that in another second the British blood would have reached fisticuff temperature, and they would have clinched. But luckily an interruption arrived to break the tension. The third mate, that terribly abused young man who was gaining a breathing space whilst Carter stood up against Captain Image's tongue, at first conned the _M'poso_ up the winding channel with a sigh of relief, and was ably seconded by the quartermaster at the wheel, who had also been suffering. But by degrees their sporting instincts drew them from the matter immediately in hand, and made them interested spectators of the duel. In fact their interest absorbed them, and, well, the steamer got the smallest bit out of hand.