With skill enhanced by constant and encouraged practice, they set out to bind the wounds and raise our damaged ships to a further lease of sea-activity. So definite and sure are their methods, so skilled and rapid their execution, they steam ahead of reconstruction and crowd the waiting-room at the dry-dock gates. Lined up at the anchorage awaiting their turn, the recovered vessels may be crippled and bent, and showing torsion and distress in the list, and staggering trim with which they swing flood and ebb. They may rest, halting, on the inshore shallow flats, but, laid by for a term of repair, their day is to come again. The Salvage Section has reclaimed their rent and stranded hulls from the misty sea-Front; the Repair Section, working day and night, will hammer and bind and reframe the gaps of their steel; the Sea Section will take them out on the old stormy road, sound and seaworthy, with the flag at the peak once more. A DAY ON THE SHOALS THE rigger was engaged at second tucks of a five-inch wire-splicing job, and hardly looked in the direction we indicated. "Them," he said. "Them's crocks wot we don't want nothin' more t' do with! Two on 'em's got frozen mutton. High? Excelsi-bloody-or! . . . an' that feller as is down by th' 'ead--Gawd! 'e don't 'arf smell 'orrible!" A pause, while he hammered down the strands and found fault with his assistant, gave us time to disentangle the negatives of his opening. "Grain, she 'as--an' of all th' ruddy messes wot I ever see--she gets it! We 'ad four days at 'er--out there 'n th' Padrig Flats, an' she sickened nigh all 'ands! . . . Now we're well quit o' 'er, an' th' longshore gangs is unloadin' th' bulk, in nosebags an' gas 'elmets, t' get 'er a-trim for th' dry dock!" As we passed alee of the grain-carrier there was no doubt of the truth of the rigger's assurance. Steam-pumps on her fore-deck were forcing a sickly mixture of liquid batter through hoses to a barge alongside, and the overpowering stench of the mess blew down to us and set eyes and noses quickening with instant nausea. The men on the barges were garbed in odd headgear, high cowls with staring circular eyepieces, and each carried a knapsack cylinder on his back. Clouds of high-pressure steam from the winches and pumps threw out in exhaust, and the hooded, ghost-like figures of the labourers passed and repassed in drifts of white vapour. To the hiss and rumble of machines, clamour of block-sheaves and chain and piston joined action to make a setting of _Inferno_, the scene might well be imagery for a stage of unholy rites. Past her, we turned to the clean salt breeze again and stood on to the open sea. The salvage officer, a Commander, R.N.R., joined us at the rail. "What about that now? Sa--lubrious?" he said. We wondered how men could be got to work in such an atmosphere, how it was possible to handle such foul-smelling litter in the confined holds.