"I'm the noblest outcome of human ingenuity--Mr. Buchanan says so," squealed the high-pressure cylinder. "This is simply ridiculous!" The piston went up savagely, and choked, for half the steam behind it was mixed with dirty water. "Help! Oiler! Fitter! Stoker! Help! I'm choking," it gasped. "Never in the history of maritime invention has such a calamity overtaken one so young and strong. And if I go, who's to drive the ship?" "Hush! oh, hush!" whispered the Steam, who, of course, had been to sea many times before. He used to spend his leisure ashore in a cloud, or a gutter, or a flower-pot, or a thunder-storm, or anywhere else where water was needed. "That's only a little priming, a little carrying-over, as they call 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 is n'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 west-north-westerly pull that follows the twist, which seriously annoys us. We mention this because we happened to cost a good 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 is out of owner's hand, for the present," said the Steam, slipping into the condenser. "You're left to your own devices till the weather betters." "I would n't mind the weather," said a flat bass voice 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 lowest plate in the bottom of a ship, and the _Dimbula's_ garboard-strake was nearly three-quarters of an inch mild steel. "The sea pushes me up in a way I should never have expected," the strake grunted, "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, ain't more than five-sixteenths of an inch thick--scandalous, I call it."