The engine-room staff was headed by Chief Engine Room Artificer Hoskins, a hoary-headed old sinner of the old school, who could coax a Diesel engine to run on air or coal-dust if necessary and was, moreover, in a permanent state of growl. Raymond swore by him, and had, like the coxswain, taken him from ship to ship in his upward career. He had joined the Navy as a fitter and turner at the age of twenty-two, having just completed his apprenticeship in one of the great shipbuilding yards on the Tyne, and had been entered as a Fourth Class Artificer. His keenness and wonderful ability with anything mechanical had urged him to join the Submarine Service, where he was practically in charge of his own engines. Give him an oil-can and a lump of waste, varied occasionally by a foot-rule and Macmahon wrench, and he would be happy for hours. The second, third, and fourth E.R.A.’s were all much younger men who had joined under the new scheme as Boy Artificers at the training college at Devonport, whence they had emerged, having received all their knowledge from the Service, and in due course been rated Artificers, 4th Class. They were now slowly working their way up, and had joined the Submarine Service since the war, when the necessity for capable men had inspired them with the wish for more authority than fell to their lots in the engine-rooms of a Battleship. The Stoker Petty Officer was a bearded and efficient ruffian, and the oldest man in the boat. Unlike the seamen, the stokers do not join the Navy as boys, but at about the age of eighteen, and this particular old sinner had had rather a rough time of it in his early days. However, he had kept going, and as only men of good character are admitted to submarines, it speaks well of him that he had not fallen by the wayside. In a submarine he had seen freedom from dirt and eternal coal shovelling, raking, and slicing, as well as extra pay and other privileges, and the added dangers of the life did not seem to worry him in the least. His right-hand man was the Leading Stoker, who had seen much the same side of life as his senior, to whose rating he was now aspiring. He was a man of good solid worth, a little fond of the bottle; and possessed of many relations whose sudden deaths necessitated his immediate presence in the home circle. But he was a good man and knew his work and the men under him, and the engines never ran so smoothly as when he was superintending the oiling and other equally necessary operations.