The fireman is called with the sailor at eight bells. Hastily putting on his shirt, trousers, and boots, he descends by many iron ladders past grim walls of iron that glow with fervent heat, and give out a vibrant hum, telling of the pent-up power within. Down, down he goes, until at last he stands upon an iron floor slightly raised above the very bottom of the vessel. Over his head there is a circular opening, down which comes a steady draught of cool air--that is, if the ship be in regions where the temperature will allow of the air being cool. At any rate, this air is fresh. It is conducted below by the intervention of those huge bell-mouthed ventilators, which are so prominent a feature of every steamship's deck equipment. In front of him towers the face of the boiler, that now claims him as its slave for four hours. It is ornamented by divers strange-looking taps and gauges and tubes, with the use of which he must be familiar. And it has a voice, an utterance that, while not loud, is so penetrating that soon it seems to a novice as if it were reverberating within his skull. It is the speech of imprisoned steam that finds no outlet by any channel except the one provided for it, the complaint of the awful giant who is rending at every square inch of his prison walls in the one supreme, never-ceasing effort to escape. It is utterly disregarded by the fireman: doubtful, indeed, whether he even hears it, or is in any way conscious of it, for it is more to be felt by the whole of the nerve centres than merely through the ears. His concern is with the three vast throats that occupy the lower third of the boiler. And there is no time to be lost. Seizing a shovel, he lifts with it the latch of one of the doors, and flings it wide open with a clang. The ship may be rolling furiously, tumbling to and fro with that peculiarly disconcerting motion that seems to a landsman the subversion of all principles of uprightness, but he must balance himself somehow. With legs spread wide apart, he stands upon that slippery iron floor, stoops, and peers within at the roaring cavern of almost white-hot coals. His trained eye can see just how they are burning; where clinkers are forming, whether perfect combustion is going on, or certain expert manipulation is necessary in order to make it do so. If all is satisfactory he shifts his position slightly sideways, so that he can swing his shovel on one side to the bunker door, at the sill of which a heap of coal is lying, fill it, and then, with a peculiar stroke, send its contents broadcast over the lambent surface of the furnace bed. The mere shovelling of coals into a fire has no relation to the careful, intelligent stoking of a steamship's furnaces, as engineers are never weary of saying. There is as much difference between a good fireman and an incompetent one--although the latter may work far harder than the former--as there is between a good and bad carpenter, or any other skilled worker.