It was while I was being initiated into the technique of stoking by shovelling coal under the boilers at the rate indicated to keep the steam at "Half" that a change of course brought the swinging seas dead abeam and set the ship rolling even more drunkenly than before. After failing to hit the "dark spots" and "hollows" two or three times as I staggered to the roll, and once even missing the furnace door itself, one of the stokers, taking compassion, relieved me of the scoop and put the trouble right with half a dozen quickly tossed shovelfuls. I was frankly glad to work over to where I could take a "half Nelson" round a bar by the starboard bunker, for the way the open mouth of the furnace was suddenly jumping up at me in the lurches was something more than disconcerting, especially after one of my fellow stokers had told me that his scarred forearm was the result of having once been pitched forward against a red-hot door of the furnace under a destroyer's boiler. It was easy to see that stoking the furnaces of a ship with a 25 to 30 degree roll is no job for a novice. Keeping one's balance without holding on to something was difficult enough all of the time, and there were intervals when it was a sheer impossibility. Yet the inexorable gong rang out its warnings just the same, and when the number of the door to be stoked slipped into place on the dial, the particular stretch of glowing coals commanded by that aperture had to be fed willy-nilly. With the coal "skip" doing a dervish dance from one end to the other of the narrow space, and with even lumps of the coal itself indulging in punitive expeditions on their own account, the waiting stoker needed all the quick-wittedness and shifty-footedness of a bull-fighter combined with the nicety of balance of a tight-rope walker to carry on at all. Yet carry on he did, and with only less clocklike a regularity than the imperturbable "Kilroy" itself. A heavy slam-banging from the opposite end of the boiler-room indicated that things were not going quite so smoothly there, and edging cautiously along I was presently able to get some hint of the cause from the words of a volubly cursing stoker who limped out to tell me that the "blinkin' skip 'as took charge." Rubbing a bruised shin and glowering balefully from a blackened eye which appeared to have bumped against a boiler, he explained, in language more forceful than elegant, that some unpractical theorist had encouraged them to experiment with wheels on the side of the skip with the idea of making it easier to push about over the coal-cluttered deck. This had turned out a very satisfactory "safe-in-harbour" expedient, but the increased mobility which had been so useful in fair weather had proved its undoing in foul.