It was a glorious, clear, dead calm morning, and in single file, with less than half a mile between each, their bands playing and their tugboats shouting and waving handkerchiefs, were the _Majestic_, the _Paris_, the _Touraine_, the _Servia_, the _Kaiser Wilhelm II._, and the _Werkendam_, all statelily going out to sea. As the _Dimbula_ shifted her helm to give the great boats clear way, the Steam (who knows far too much to mind making an exhibition of himself now and then) shouted: “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! Princes, Dukes, and Barons of the High Seas! Know ye by these presents, we are the _Dimbula_, fifteen days nine hours from Liverpool, having crossed the Atlantic with four thousand ton of cargo for the first time in our career! We have not foundered. We are here. ’_Eer! ’Eer!_ We are not disabled. But we have had a time wholly unparalleled in the annals of ship-building! Our decks were swept! We pitched; we rolled! We thought we were going to die! _Hi! Hi!_ But we didn’t. We wish to give notice that we have come to New York all the way across the Atlantic, through the worst weather in the world; and we are the _Dimbula!_ We are—arr—ha—ha—ha-r-r-r!” The beautiful line of boats swept by as steadily as the procession of the Seasons. The _Dimbula_ heard the _Majestic_ say, “Hmph!” and the _Paris_ grunted, “How!” and the _Touraine_ said, “Oui!” with a little coquettish flicker of steam; and the _Servia_ said, “Haw!” and the _Kaiser_ and the _Werkendam_ said, “Hoch!” Dutch fashion—and that was absolutely all. “I did my best,” said the Steam, gravely, “but I don’t think they were much impressed with us, somehow. Do you?” “It’s simply disgusting,” said the bow-plates. “They might have seen what we’ve been through. There isn’t a ship on the sea that has suffered as we have—is there, now?” “Well, I wouldn’t go so far as that,” said the Steam, “because I’ve worked on some of those boats, and sent them through weather quite as bad as the fortnight that we’ve had, in six days; and some of them are a little over ten thousand tons, I believe. Now I’ve seen the _Majestic_, for instance, ducked from her bows to her funnel; and I’ve helped the _Arizona_, I think she was, to back off an iceberg she met with one dark night; and I had to run out of the _Paris’s_ engine-room, one day, because there was thirty foot of water in it. Of course, I don’t deny—” The Steam shut off suddenly, as a tugboat, loaded with a political club and a brass band, that had been to see a New York Senator off to Europe, crossed their bows, going to Hoboken. There was a long silence that reached, without a break, from the cut-water to the propeller-blades of the _Dimbula_. Then a new, big voice said slowly and thickly, as though the owner had just waked up: “It’s my conviction that I have made a fool of myself.”