"Fiddle!" said the iron pillars of the deep, dark hold. "Who ever heard of curves? Stand up straight; be a perfectly round column, and carry tons of good solid weight. Like that! There!" A big sea smashed on to the deck above, and the pillars stiffened themselves to the load. "Straight up and down is not bad," said the frames who run that way in the sides of the ship, "but you must also expand yourself sideways. Expansion is the law of life, children. Open out! Open out!" "Come back!" said the deck beam, savagely, as the upward heave of the sea made the frames try to open. "Come back to your bearings, you slack-jawed irons!" "Rigidity! Rigidity! Rigidity!" thumped the engines. "Absolute, unvarying rigidity--rigidity!" "You see!" whined the rivets in chorus. "No two of you will ever pull alike, and--and you blame it all on us. We only know how to go through a plate and bite down on both sides so that it can't and mustn't and sha'n't move." "I've got one-sixteenth of an inch play at any rate," said the garboard strake triumphantly; and so he had, and all the bottom of the ship felt a good deal easier for it. "Then we're no good," sobbed the bottom rivets. "We were ordered--we were _ordered_--never to give, and we've given, and the sea will come in, and we'll all go to the bottom together! First we're blamed for everything unpleasant, and now we haven't the consolation of having done our work." "Don't say I told you," whispered the steam consolingly; "but, between you and me and the cloud I last came from, it was bound to happen sooner or later. You _had_ to give a fraction, and you've given without knowing it. Now hold on, as before." "What's the use?" a few hundred rivets chattered. "We've given--we've given; and the sooner we confess that we can't keep the ship together and go off our little heads, the easier it will be. No rivet forged could stand this strain." "No one rivet was ever meant to. Share it among you," the steam answered. "The others can have my share. I'm going to pull out," said a rivet in one of the forward plates. "If you go, others will follow," hissed the steam. "There's nothing so contagious in a boat as rivets going. Why, I knew a little chap like you--he was an eighth of an inch fatter, though--on a steamer--to be sure, she was only twelve tons, now I come to think of it--in exactly the same place as you are. _He_ pulled out in a bit of a bobble of a sea, not half as bad as this, and he started all his friends on the same butt-strap, and the plate opened like a furnace door, and I had to climb into the nearest fog bank while the boat went down." "Now that's peculiarly disgraceful," said the rivet. "Fatter than me, was he, and in a steamer not half our tonnage? Reedy little peg! I blush for the family, sir." He settled himself more firmly than ever in his place, and the steam chuckled.