Chapter II: Part 2

To practise law he must abandon his business as surveyor, which was bringing him a fair income; he must for a time, at least, go without any certain income. If he failed, what then? The uncertainty weighed on him heavily, the more so because he was burdened by the debts left from his store and because he was constantly called upon to aid his father's family. Thomas Lincoln had remained in Coles County, but he had not, in these six years in which his son had risen so rapidly, been able to get anything more than a poor livelihood from his farm. The sense of responsibility Lincoln had towards his father's family made it the more difficult for him to undertake a new profession. His decision was made, however, and as soon as the session of the Tenth Assembly was over he started for Springfield. His first appearance there is as pathetic as amusing.

"He had ridden into town," says Joshua Speed, "on a borrowed horse, with no earthly property save a pair of saddle-bags containing a few clothes. I was a merchant at Springfield, and kept a large country store, embracing dry-goods, groceries, hardware, books, medicines, bed-clothes, mattresses--in fact, everything that the country needed. Lincoln came into the store with his saddle-bags on his arm. He said he wanted to buy the furniture for a single bed. The mattress, blankets, sheets, coverlid, and pillow, according to the figures made by me, would cost seventeen dollars. He said that perhaps was cheap enough; but small as the price was, he was unable to pay it. But if I would credit him till Christmas, and his experiment as a lawyer was a success, he would pay then; saying in the saddest tone, 'If I fail in this I do not know that I can ever pay you.' As I looked up at him I thought then, and I think now, that I never saw a sadder face.

"I said to him: 'You seem to be so much pained at contracting so small a debt, I think I can suggest a plan by which you can avoid the debt, and at the same time attain your end. I have a large room with a double bed upstairs, which you are very welcome to share with me.'

"'Where is your room?' said he.

"'Upstairs,' said I, pointing to a pair of winding stairs which led from the store to my room.

"He took his saddle-bags on his arm, went upstairs, set them on the floor, and came down with the most changed expression of countenance. Beaming with pleasure, he exclaimed:

"'Well, Speed, I am moved.'"

Another friend, William Butler, with whom Lincoln had become intimate at Vandalia, took him to board; life at Springfield thus began under as favorable auspices as he could hope for.

After Chicago, Springfield was at that day the most promising city in Illinois. It had some fifteen hundred inhabitants, and the removal of the capital was certain to bring many more. Already, in fact, the town felt the effect. Houses and blocks were started; lawyers, politicians, tradesmen, laborers, were pouring in. Hitherto most of the dwellings had been of log or frame; now, however, there was an increase in brick buildings.

The effect was apparent too, in society. "We used to eat all together," said an old man who in the early thirties came to Springfield as a hostler; "but about this time some one came along and told the people they oughtn't to do so, and then the hired folks ate in the kitchen." This differentiation was apparent to Lincoln and a little discouraging. He was thinking vaguely, at the time of this removal to Springfield, that perhaps he best marry a Miss Mary Owens, with whom he had become intimately acquainted in 1836 in New Salem; but Springfield society, and the impossibility of his supporting a wife in it, discouraged him.

"I am often thinking of what we said about your coming to live
at Springfield," he wrote her in May.

"I am afraid you would not be satisfied. There is a great deal
of flourishing about in carriages here, which it would be your
doom to see without sharing it. You would have to be poor,
without the means of hiding your poverty. Do you believe you
could bear that patiently? Whatever woman may cast her lot
with mine, should any ever do so, it is my intention to do
all in my power to make her happy and contented; and there is
nothing I can imagine that would make me more unhappy than to
fail in the effort. I know I should be much happier with you
than the way I am, provided I saw no signs of discontent in
you. What you have said to me may have been in the way of
jest, or I may have misunderstood it. If so, then let it be
forgotten; if otherwise, I much wish you would think seriously
before you decide. What I have said I will most positively
abide by, provided you wish it. My opinion is that you had
better not do it. You have not been accustomed to hardship,
and it may be more severe than you now imagine. I know you
are capable of thinking correctly on any subject, and if you
deliberate maturely upon this before you decide, then I am
willing to abide your decision."

When the Illinois legislature adopted the above plan of internal improvement in 1837, there was in the whole United States only about eleven hundred miles of railroad. The above scheme provided for thirteen hundred and fifty. The basis of the outlines used by the committee in developing the plan was contained in a series of resolutions offered in the beginning of the session by Stephen A. Douglas. In the house the vote on the bill stood sixty-one in favor to twenty-five against.]

This decidedly dispassionate view of their relation seems not to have brought any decision from Miss Owens; for three months later Mr. Lincoln wrote her an equally judicial letter, telling her that he could not think of her "with entire indifference," that he in all cases wanted to do right and "most particularly so in all cases with women," and summing up his position as follows:

"What I do wish is that our further acquaintance shall depend
upon yourself. If such further acquaintance would contribute
nothing to your happiness, I am sure it would not to mine. If
you feel yourself in any degree bound to me, I am now willing
to release you, provided you wish it; while, on the other
hand, I am willing and even anxious to bind you faster, if I
can be convinced that it will in any considerable degree add
to your happiness. This, indeed, is the whole question with
me. Nothing would make me more miserable than to believe you
miserable--nothing more happy than to know you were so."

Miss Owens had enough discernment to recognize the disinterestedness of this love-making, and she refused Mr. Lincoln's offer. She found him "deficient in those little links which make up the chain of a woman's happiness," she said. The affair seems to have been a rather vigorous flirtation on her part, which had interested and perhaps flattered Mr. Lincoln. In the sincerity of his nature he feared he had awakened a genuine attachment, and his notions of honor compelled him to find out. When finally refused, he wrote a description of the affair to a friend, in which he ridiculed himself unmercifully:

"I was mortified, it seemed to me, in a hundred different
ways. My vanity was deeply wounded by the reflection that I
had so long been too stupid to discover her intentions, and at
the same time never doubting that I understood them perfectly;
and also that she, whom I had taught myself to believe nobody
else would have, had actually rejected me with all my fancied
greatness. And, to cap the whole, I then for the first time
began to suspect that I was really a little in love with her.
But let it all go! I'll try and outlive it. Others have been
made fools of by the girls, but this can never with truth be
said of me. I most emphatically, in this instance, made a fool
of myself. I have now come to the conclusion never again
to think of marrying; and for this reason--I can never be
satisfied with any one who would be blockhead enough to have
me."

LINCOLN'S POSITION IN SPRINGFIELD.

It was not long before Lincoln became a favorite figure in Springfield. The skill, the courage, and the good-will he had shown in his management of the bill for the removal of the capital gave him at once, of course, special prominence. The entire "Long Nine," indeed, were regarded by the county as its benefactors, and throughout the summer there were barbecues and fireworks, dinners and speeches in their honor. "The service rendered Old Sangamon by the present delegation" was a continually recurring toast at every gathering. At one "sumptuous dinner" the internal improvement scheme in all its phases was toasted again and again by the banqueters, "'The Long Nine' of Old Sangamon--well done, good and faithful servants," drew forth long applause. Among those who offered volunteer toasts at this dinner were "A. Lincoln, Esq.," and "S.A. Douglas, Esq."

At a dinner at Athens, given to the delegation, eight formal toasts and twenty-five volunteers are quoted in the report of the affair in the "Sangamo Journal." Among them were the following:

A. Lincoln. He has fulfilled the expectations of his friends
and disappointed the hopes of his enemies.

A. Lincoln. One of nature's noblemen.

By A. Lincoln. Sangamon County will ever be true to her best
interests, and never more so than in reciprocating the good
feelings of the citizens of Athens and neighborhood.

Lincoln had not been long in Springfield before he soon was able to support himself, a result due, no doubt, very largely to his personal qualities and to his reputation as a shrewd politician. Not that he made money. The fee-book of Lincoln and Stuart shows that the returns were modest enough, and that sometimes they even "traded out" their account. Nevertheless it was a satisfaction to earn a livelihood so soon. Of his peculiar methods as a lawyer at this date we know very little. Most of his cases are utterly uninteresting. The very first year he was in Springfield, however, he had one case which created a great sensation, and which, so far as we know, has been overlooked entirely by his biographers. It is an admirable example of the way Lincoln could combine business and politics as well as of his merciless persistency in pursuing a man whom he believed unjust.

It seems that among the offices to be filled at the August election of 1837 was that of probate justice of the peace. One of the candidates was General James Adams, a man who had come on from the East in the early twenties, and who had at first claimed to be a lawyer. He had been an aspirant for various offices, among them that of governor of the State, but with little success. A few days before the August election of 1837 an anonymous hand-bill was scattered about the streets. It was an attack on General Adams, charging him with having acquired the title to a ten-acre lot of ground near the town by the deliberate forgery of the name of Joseph Anderson, of Fulton County, Illinois, to an assignment of a judgment. Anderson had died, and the widow, upon going to Springfield to dispose of the land, was surprised to find that it was claimed by General Adams, and she employed Stuart and Lincoln to look into the matter. The hand-bill, which went into all of the details at great length, concluded as follows: "I have only made these statements because I am known by many to be one of the individuals against whom the charge of forging the assignment and slipping it into the general's papers has been made; and because our silence might be construed into a confession of the truth. I shall not subscribe my name; but hereby authorize the editor of the 'Journal' to give it up to any one who may call for it.".

After the election, at which General Adams had been elected, the hand-bill was reproduced in the "Sangamo Journal," with a card signed by the editor, in which he said: "To save any further remarks on this subject, I now state that A. Lincoln, Esq., is the author of the hand-bill in question." The same issue of the paper contained a lengthy communication from General Adams, denying the charge of fraud.

The controversy was continued for several weeks. General Adams used, mostly, the columns of the "Springfield Republican," filling six columns of a single issue. He charged that the assault upon him was the result of a conspiracy between "a knot of lawyers, doctors, and others," who wished to ruin his reputation. Lincoln's answers to Adams are most emphatic. In one case, quoting several of his assertions, he pronounced them "all as false as hell, as all this community must know." Adams's replies were always voluminous. "Such is the turn which things have lately taken," wrote Lincoln, "that when General Adams writes a book I am expected to write a commentary on it." Replying to Adams's denunciation of the lawyers, he said: "He attempted to impose himself upon the community as a lawyer, and he actually carried the attempt so far as to induce a man who was under the charge of murder to entrust the defence of his life to his hands, and finally took his money and got him hanged. Is this the man that is to raise a breeze in his favor by abusing lawyers? ... If he is not a lawyer, he _is_ a liar; for he proclaimed himself a lawyer, and got a man hanged by depending on him." Lincoln concluded: "Farewell, General. I will see you again at court, if not before--when and where we will settle the question whether you or the widow shall have the land." The widow did get the land, but this was not the worst thing that happened to Adams. The climax was reached when the "Sangamo Journal" published a long editorial (written by Lincoln, no doubt) on the controversy, and followed it with a copy of an indictment found against Adams in Oswego County, New York, in 1818. The offence charged in this indictment was the forgery of a deed by Adams--"a person of evil name and fame and of a wicked disposition."

Lincoln's victory in this controversy undoubtedly did much to impress the community, not necessarily that he was a good lawyer, but rather that he was a clever strategist and a fearless enemy. It was not, in fact, as a lawyer that he was prominent in the first years after he came to Springfield. Reëlected to the Assembly in 1838, and again in 1840, his real impress on the community was made as a politician. The qualities which he had already shown in public life were only strengthened as he gained experience and self-confidence. He was the terror of the pretentious and insincere, and had a way of exposing their shams by clever tricks which, to voters, were unanswerable arguments. A case in point happened in 1840. It was considered necessary, at that day, by a candidate to prove to the farmers that he was poor and, like themselves, horny-handed. Those politicians who wore good clothes and dined sumptuously were careful to conceal their regard for the elegancies of life from their constituents. One of the Democrats who in this campaign took particular pains to decry the Whigs for their wealth and aristocratic principles was Colonel Dick Taylor, generally known in Illinois as "ruffled-shirt Taylor." He was a vain and handsome man, who habitually arrayed himself as gorgeously as the fashion allowed. One day when he and Lincoln had met in debate at a countryside gathering, Colonel Dick became particularly bitter in his condemnation of Whig elegance. Lincoln listened for a time, and then, slipping near the speaker, suddenly caught his coat, which was buttoned up close, and tore it open. A mass of ruffled shirt, a gorgeous velvet vest, and a great gold chain from which dangled numerous rings and seals, were uncovered to the crowd. Lincoln needed to make no further reply that day to the charge of being a "rag baron."

Lincoln loved fair play as he hated shams; and throughout these early years in Springfield are examples of his boldness in insisting that friend and enemy have the chance due them. A most dramatic case of this kind occurred at a political meeting held one evening in the Springfield court-room, which at that date was temporarily in a hall under Stuart and Lincoln's law office. Directly over the platform was a trap-door. Lincoln frequently would lie by this opening during a meeting, listening to the speeches. One evening one of his friends, E.D. Baker, in speaking angered the crowd, and an attempt was made to "pull him down." Before the assailants could reach the platform, however, a pair of long legs dangled from the trap-door, and in an instant Lincoln dropped down beside Baker, crying out, "Hold on, gentlemen, this is a land of free speech." His appearance was so unexpected, and his attitude so determined, that the crowd soon was quiet, and Baker went on with his speech.

In all the intellectual life of the town he took a place. With a few of the leading young men he formed a young men's lyceum. One of his speeches before this body has been preserved in full. Its subject is "The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions."[4] The speech has not, however, any of the peculiarly original style which usually characterized his efforts.

He came immediately to be a favorite figure in all sorts of local affairs. What he said and did on these occasions is still recollected by those interested in them. "When the seat of government was removed from Vandalia to Springfield in 1836," says the Rev. Peter Wallace of Chicago "I obtained the contract of taking down the court-house to make a place for the State House. Lincoln, with others, was present to receive the job. 'Peter,' he said to me, 'if you succeed as well in building houses as you have in tearing this one down, you will make your mark as a builder.'" Mr. Wallace tells, too, of hearing Lincoln say in a speech, at the funeral of one of their friends: "I read in a book whose author never errs, 'Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you.' Our friend will escape that woe, for he would be the exception had he no enemies."

The most pleasing feature of his early life in the town was the way in which he attached all classes of people to him. He naturally, from his political importance and from his relation to Mr. Stuart, was admitted to the most exclusive circle of society. But Lincoln was not received there from tolerance of his position only. The few members left of that interesting circle of Springfield in the thirties are emphatic in their statements that he was recognized as a valuable social factor. If indifferent to forms and little accustomed to conventional usages, he had a native dignity and self-respect which stamped him at once as a superior man. He had a good will, an easy adaptability to people, which made him take a hand in everything that went on. His name appears in every list of banqueters and merry-makers reported in the Springfield papers. He even served as committee-man for cotillion parties. "We liked Lincoln, though he was not gay," said one charming and cultivated old lady to me in Springfield. "He rarely danced, he was never very attentive to ladies, but he was always a welcome guest everywhere, and the centre of a circle of animated talkers. Indeed, I think the only thing we girls had against Lincoln was that he always attracted all the men around him."

Lincoln's kindly interest and perfectly democratic feeling attached to him many people whom he never met save on the streets. Indeed his life in the streets of Springfield is a most touching and delightful study. He concerned himself in the progress of every building which was put up, of every new street which was opened; he passed nobody without recognition; he seemed always to have time to stop and talk. He became, in fact, part of Springfield street life, just as he had of the town's politics and society. By 1840 there was no man in the town better known, better liked, more sought for; though there were more than one whose future was considered brighter.

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: Reminiscences of Mr. Weir, a former resident of Sangamon County, related by E.B. Howell of Butte, Montana.]

[Footnote 2: Summary condensed from Moses's "History of Illinois."]

[Footnote 3: The original of this letter is owned by E.R. Oeltjen of Petersburg, Illinois.]

[Footnote 4: Lincoln's address on "The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions" is dated January 27, 1837, in most biographies, but it was published in the "Sangamo Journal" of February 3, 1838. The address is preceded by the following resolution:

"YOUNG MEN'S LYCEUM,
SPRINGFIELD, _January 27, 1837[8]_.

"_Resolved_, That the thanks of this Lyceum be presented to A.
Lincoln, Esq., for the lecture delivered by him this evening,
and that he be solicited to furnish a copy for publication.

"JAS. H. MATHENY, _Secretary_"

The confusion as to the date of the delivery of this address evidently arises from the fact that the resolution here quoted bears the date of "1837"--a mere slip of the pen, of course. In January, 1837, Lincoln was in the legislature at Vandalia. He had not yet become a resident of Springfield. According to Mr. Herndon, who was a member of the Young Men's Lyceum, that society was not formed until the fall of 1837.]

THE SHIP THAT FOUND HERSELF.

BY RUDYARD KIPLING,

Author of "The Jungle Book," "Plain Tales from the Hills," etc.

It was her first voyage, and though she was only a little cargo steamer of two thousand five hundred tons, she was the very best of her kind, the outcome of forty years of experiments and improvements in framework and machinery; and her designers and owners thought just as much of her as though she had been the "Lucania." Any one can make a floating hotel that will pay her expenses, if he only puts enough money into the saloon, and charges for private baths, suites of rooms, and such like; but in these days of competition and low freights every square inch of a cargo boat must be built for cheapness, great hold capacity, and a certain steady speed. This boat was perhaps two hundred and forty feet long and thirty-two feet wide, with arrangements that enabled her to carry cattle on her main and sheep on her upper deck if she wanted to; but her great glory was the amount of cargo that she could store away in her holds. Her owners--they were a very well-known Scotch family--came round with her from the North, where she had been launched and christened and fitted, to Liverpool, where she was to take cargo for New York; and the owner's daughter, Miss Frazier, went to and fro on the clean decks, admiring the new paint and the brass-work and the patent winches, and particularly the strong, straight bow, over which she had cracked a bottle of very good champagne when she christened the steamer the "Dimbula." It was a beautiful September afternoon, and the boat in all her newness (she was painted lead color, with a red funnel) looked very fine indeed. Her house flag was flying, and her whistle from time to time acknowledged the salutes of friendly boats, who saw that she was new to the sea and wished to make her welcome.

"And now," said Miss Frazier, delightedly, to the captain, "she's a real ship, isn't she? It seems only the other day father gave the order for her, and now--and now--isn't she a beauty?" The girl was proud of the firm, and talked as though she were the controlling partner.

"Oh, she's no so bad," the skipper replied, cautiously. "But I'm sayin' that it takes more than the christenin' to mak' a ship. In the nature o' things, Miss Frazier, if ye follow me, she's just irons and rivets and plates put into the form of a ship. She has to find herself yet."

"But I thought father said she was exceptionally well found."

"So she is," said the skipper, with a laugh. "But it's this way wi' ships, Miss Frazier. She's all here, but the parts of her have not learned to work together yet. They've had no chance."

"But the engines are working beautifully. I can hear them."

"Yes, indeed. But there is more than engines to a ship. Every inch of her, ye'll understand, has to be livened up, and made to work wi' its neighbor--sweetenin' her, we call it, technically."

"And how will you do it?" the girl asked.

"We can no more than drive and steer her and so forth; but if we have rough weather this trip--it's likely--she'll learn the rest by heart! For a ship, ye'll obsairve, Miss Frazier, is in no sense a reegid body, closed at both ends. She's a highly complex structure o' various an' conflictin' strains, wi' tissues that must give an' tak' accordin' to her personal modulus of eelasteecity." Mr. Buchanan, the chief engineer, in his blue coat with gilt buttons, was coming toward them. "I'm sayin' to Miss Frazier, here, that our little 'Dimbula' has to be sweetened yet, and nothin' but a gale will do it. How's all wi' your engines, Buck?"

"Well enough--true by plumb an' rule, of course; but there's no spontaneeity yet." He turned to the girl. "Take my word, Miss Frazier, and maybe ye'll comprehend later, even after a pretty girl's christened a ship it does not follow that there's such a thing as a ship under the men that work her."

"I was sayin' the very same, Mr. Buchanan," the skipper interrupted.

"That's more metaphysical than I can follow," said Miss Frazier, laughing.

"Why so? Ye're good Scotch, an'--I knew your mother's father; he was fra' Dumfries--ye've a vested right in metapheesics, Miss Frazier, just as ye have in the 'Dimbula,'" the engineer said.

"Eh, well, we must go down to the deep watters, an' earn Miss Frazier her deevidends. Will you not come to my cabin for tea?" said the skipper. "We'll be in dock the night, and when you're goin' back to Glasgie ye can think of us loadin' her down an' drivin' her forth--all for your sake."

In the next four days they stowed nearly four thousand tons dead weight into the "Dimbula," and took her out from Liverpool. As soon as she met the lift of the open water she naturally began to talk. If you put your ear to the side of the cabin the next time you are in a steamer, you will hear hundreds of little voices in every direction, thrilling and buzzing, and whispering and popping, and gurgling and sobbing and squeaking exactly like a telephone in a thunder storm. Wooden ships shriek and growl and grunt, but iron vessels throb and quiver through all their hundreds of ribs and thousands of rivets. The "Dimbula" was very strongly built, and every piece of her had a letter or a number or both to describe it, and every piece had been hammered or forged or rolled or punched by man and had lived in the roar and rattle of the shipyard for months. Therefore, every piece had its own separate voice in exact proportion to the amount of trouble spent upon it. Cast iron, as a rule, says very little; but mild steel plates and wrought iron, and ribs and beams that have been bent and welded and riveted a good deal, talk continuously. Their conversation, of course, is not half as wise as human talk, because they are all, though they do not know it, bound down one to the other in black darkness, where they cannot tell what is happening near them, nor what is going to happen next.

A very short while after she had cleared the Irish coast a sullen, gray-headed old wave of the Atlantic climbed leisurely over her straight bows, and sat down on the steam capstan, used for hauling up the anchor. Now, the capstan and the engine that drove it had been newly painted red and green; besides which, nobody cares for being ducked.

"Don't you do that again," the capstan sputtered through the teeth of his cogs. "Hi! Where's the fellow gone?"

The wave had slouched overside with a plop and a chuckle; but "Plenty more where he came from," said a brother wave, and went through and over the capstan, who was bolted firmly to an iron plate on the iron deck beams below.

"Can't you keep still up there," said the deck beams. "What's the matter with you? One minute you weigh twice as much as you ought to, and the next you don't."

"It isn't my fault," said the capstan. "There's a green brute from outside that comes and hits me on the head."

"Tell that to the shipwrights. You've been in position up there for months, and you've never wriggled like this before. If you aren't careful you'll strain _us_."

"Talking of strain," said a low, rasping, unpleasant voice, "are any of you fellows--you deck beams, we mean--aware that those exceedingly ugly knees of yours happen to be riveted into our structure--_ours_?"

"Who might you be?" the deck beams inquired.

"Oh, nobody in particular," was the answer. "We're only the port and starboard upper-deck stringers; and, if you persist in heaving and hiking like this, we shall be reluctantly compelled to take steps."

Now, the stringers of the ship are long iron girders, so to speak, that run lengthways from stern to bow. They keep the iron frames (what are called ribs in a wooden ship) in place, and also help to hold the ends of the deck beams which go from side to side of the ship. Stringers always consider themselves most important, because they are so long. In the "Dimbula" there were four stringers on each side--one far down by the bottom of the hold, called the bilge stringer; one a little higher up, called the side stringer; one on the floor of the lower deck; and the upper-deck stringers that have been heard from already.

"You will take steps, will you?" This was a long, echoing rumble. It came from the frames; scores and scores of them, each one about eighteen inches distant from the next, and each riveted to the stringers in four places. "We think you will have a certain amount of trouble in _that_;" and thousands and thousands of the little rivets that held everything together whispered: "You will! You will! Stop quivering and be quiet. Hold on, brethren! Hold on! Hot punches! What's that?"

Rivets have no teeth, so they can't chatter with fright; but they did their best as a fluttering jar swept along the ship from stern to bow, and she shook like a rat in a terrier's mouth.

An unusually severe pitch, for the sea was rising, had lifted the big throbbing screw nearly to the surface, and it was spinning round in a kind of soda water--half sea and half air--going much faster than was right, because there was no deep water for it to work in. As it sank again, the engines--and they were triple-expansion, three cylinders in a row--snorted through all their three pistons: "Was that a joke, you fellow outside? It's an uncommonly poor one. How are we to do _our_ work if you fly off the handle that way?"

"I didn't fly off the handle," said the screw, twirling huskily at the end of the screw shaft. "If I had, _you'd_ have been scrap iron by this time. The sea dropped away from under me, and I had nothing to catch on to. That's all."

"That's all, d'you call it?" said the thrust-block, whose business it is to take the push of the screw; for if a screw had nothing to hold it back it would crawl right into the engine room. (It is the holding back of the screwing action that gives the drive to a ship.) "I know I do my work deep down and out of sight, but I warn you I expect justice. All _I_ ask is justice. Why can't you push steadily and evenly, instead of whizzing like a whirligig and making me hot under all my collars?" The thrust-block had six collars, each faced with brass, and he did not want to get them heated.

All the bearings that supported the fifty feet of screw shaft as it ran to the stern whispered: "Justice--give us justice."

"I can only give you what I get," the screw answered. "Look out! It's coming again!"

He rose with a roar as the "Dimbula" plunged; and "whack--whack--whack--whack" went the engines furiously, for they had little to check them.

"I'm the noblest outcome of human ingenuity--Mr. Buchanan says so," squealed the high-pressure cylinder. "This is simply ridiculous." The piston went up savagely and choked, for half the steam behind it was mixed with dirty water. "Help! Oiler! Fitter! Stoker! Help! I'm choking," it gasped. "Never in the history of maritime invention has such a calamity overtaken one so young and strong. And if I go, who's to drive the ship?"

"Hush! oh, hush!" whispered the steam, who, of course, had been to sea many times before. He used to spend his leisure ashore, in a cloud, or a gutter, or a flower-pot, or a thunder storm, or anywhere else where water was needed. "That's only a little priming, as they call it. It'll happen all night, on and off. I don't say it's nice, but it's the best we can do under the circumstances."

"What difference can circumstances make? I'm here to do my work--on clean, dry steam. Blow circumstances!" the cylinder roared.

"The circumstances will attend to the blowing. I've worked on the North Atlantic run a good many times--it's going to be rough before morning."

"It isn't distressingly calm now," said the extra strong frames, they were called web frames, in the engine room. "There's an upward thrust that we don't understand, and there's a twist that is very bad for our brackets and diamond plates, and there's a sort of northwestward pull that follows the twist, which seriously annoys us. We mention this because _we_ happened to cost a great deal of money, and we feel sure that the owner would not approve of our being treated in this frivolous way."

"I'm afraid the matter's out of the owner's hands for the present," said the steam, slipping into the condenser. "You're left to your own devices till the weather betters."

"I wouldn't mind the weather," said a flat bass voice deep below; "it's this confounded cargo that's breaking my heart. I'm the garboard strake, and I'm twice as thick as most of the others, and I ought to know something."

The garboard strake is the very bottom-most plate in the bottom of a ship, and the "Dimbula's" garboard strake (she was a flat-bottomed boat) was nearly three-quarters of an inch mild steel.

"The sea pushes me up in a way I should never have expected," the strake went on, "and the cargo pushes me down, and between the two I don't know what I'm supposed to do."

"When in doubt, hold on," rumbled the steam, making head in the boilers.

"Yes, but there's only dark and cold and hurry down here, and how do I know whether the other plates are doing their duty? Those bulwark plates up above, I've heard, aren't more than five-sixteenths of an inch thick--scandalous, I call it."

"I agree with you," said a huge web frame by the main cargo hatch. He was deeper and thicker than all the others, and curved half-way across the ship's side in the shape of half an arch, to support the deck where deck beams would have been in the way of cargo coming up and down. "I work entirely unsupported, and I observe that I am the sole strength of this vessel, so far as my vision extends. The responsibility, I assure you, is enormous. I believe the money value of the cargo is over one hundred and fifty thousand pounds. Think of that!"

"And every pound of it dependent on my personal exertions." Here spoke a sea-valve that communicated directly with the water outside and was seated not very far from the garboard strake. "I rejoice to think that I am a Prince-Hyde valve, with best Para rubber facings. Five patents cover me--I mention this without pride--five separate and several patents, each one finer than the other. At present I am screwed fast. Should I open, you would immediately be swamped. This is incontrovertible!"

Patent things always use the longest words they can. It is a trick they pick up from their inventors.

"That's news," said a big centrifugal bilge pump. "I had an idea that you were employed to clean decks and things with. At least, I've used you for that more than once. I forget the precise number in thousands of gallons which I am guaranteed to pump in an hour; but I assure you, my complaining friends, that there is not the least danger. _I_ alone am capable of clearing any water that may find its way here. By my biggest delivery, we pitched then!"

The sea was getting up in workmanlike style. It was a dead westerly gale, blown from under a ragged opening of green sky, narrowed on all sides by fat gray clouds; and the wind bit like pincers, as it fretted the spray into lace-work on the heads of the waves.

"I tell you what it is," the foremast telephoned down its wire stays. "I'm up here, and I can take a dispassionate view of things. There's an organized conspiracy against us. I'm sure of it, because every single one of these waves is heading directly for our bows. The whole sea is concerned in it--and so's the wind. It's awful!"

"What's awful?" said a wave, drowning the capstan for the hundredth time.

"This organized conspiracy on your part," the capstan gurgled, taking his cue from the mast.

"Organized bubbles and spindrift! There has been a depression in the Gulf of Mexico. Excuse me!" He leaped overside; but his friends took up the tale one after another.

"Which has advanced--" _That_ wave threw green over the funnel.

"As far as Cape Hatteras--" _He_ drenched the bridge.

"And is now going out to sea--to sea--to sea!" _He_ went out in three surges, making a clean sweep of a boat, which turned bottom up and sank in the darkening troughs alongside.

"That's all there is to it," seethed the broken water, roaring through the scuppers. "There's no animus in our proceedings. We're a meteorological corollary."

"Is it going to get any worse?" said the bow anchor, chained down to the deck, where he could only breathe once in five minutes.

"Not knowing, can't say. Wind may blow a bit by midnight. Thanks awfully. Good-by."

The wave that spoke so politely had travelled some distance aft, and got itself all mixed up on the deck amidships, which was a well deck sunk between high bulwarks. One of the bulwark plates, which was hung on hinges to open outward, had swung out, and passed the bulk of the water back to the sea again with a wop.

"Evidently that's what I'm made for," said the plate, shutting up again with a sputter of pride. "Oh, no, you don't, my friend!"

The top of a wave was trying to get in from outside, but the plate did not open in that direction, and the defeated water spurted back.

"Not bad for five-sixteenths of an inch," said the bulwark plate. "My work, I see, is laid down for the night;" and it began opening and shutting, as it was designed to do, with the motion of the ship.

"We are not what you might call idle," groaned all the frames together, as the "Dimbula" climbed a big wave, lay on her side at the top, and shot into the next hollow, twisting as she descended. A huge swell pushed up exactly under her middle, and her bow and stern hung free, with nothing to support them, and then one joking wave caught her up at the bow, and another at the stern, while the rest of the water fell away from under her, just to see how she would like it, and she was held up at the two ends, and the weight of the cargo and the machinery fell on the groaning iron keels and bilge stringers.

"Ease off! Ease off there!" roared the garboard strake. "I want an eighth of an inch play. D'you hear me, you young rivets!"

"Ease off! ease off!" cried the bilge stringers. "Don't hold us so tight to the frames!"

"Ease off!" grunted the deck beams, as the "Dimbula" rolled fearfully. "You've cramped our knees into the stringers and we can't move. Ease off, you flat-headed little nuisances."

Then two converging seas hit the bows, one on each side, and fell away in torrents of streaming thunder.

"Ease off!" shouted the forward collision bulkhead. "I want to crumple up, but I'm stiffened in every direction. Ease off, you dirty little forge filings. Let me breathe!"

All the hundreds of plates that are riveted on to the frames, and make the outside skin of every steamer, echoed the call, for each plate wanted to shift and creep a little, and each plate, according to its position, complained against the rivets.

"We can't help it! _We_ can't help it!" they murmured. "We're put here to hold you, and we're going to do it. You never pull us twice in the same direction. If you'd say what you were going to do next, we'd try to meet your views."

"As far as I could feel," said the upper-deck planking, and that was four inches thick, "every single iron near me was pushing or pulling in opposite directions. Now, what's the sense of that? My friends, let us all pull together."

"Pull any way you please." roared the funnel, "so long as you don't try your experiments on _me_. I need fourteen wire ropes, all pulling in opposite directions, to hold me steady. Isn't that so?"

"We believe you, my boy!" whistled the funnel stays through their clenched teeth, as they twanged in the wind from the top of the funnel to the deck.

"Nonsense! We must all pull together," the decks repeated. "Pull lengthways."

"Very good," said the stringers; "then stop pushing sideways when you get wet. Be content to run gracefully fore and aft, and curve in at the ends as we do."

"No, no curves at the end. A very slight workmanlike curve from side to side, with a good grip at each knee, and little pieces welded on," said the deck beams.

"Fiddle!" said the iron pillars of the deep, dark hold. "Who ever heard of curves? Stand up straight; be a perfectly round column, and carry tons of good solid weight. Like that! There!" A big sea smashed on to the deck above, and the pillars stiffened themselves to the load.

"Straight up and down is not bad," said the frames who run that way in the sides of the ship, "but you must also expand yourself sideways. Expansion is the law of life, children. Open out! Open out!"

"Come back!" said the deck beam, savagely, as the upward heave of the sea made the frames try to open. "Come back to your bearings, you slack-jawed irons!"

"Rigidity! Rigidity! Rigidity!" thumped the engines. "Absolute, unvarying rigidity--rigidity!"

"You see!" whined the rivets in chorus. "No two of you will ever pull alike, and--and you blame it all on us. We only know how to go through a plate and bite down on both sides so that it can't and mustn't and sha'n't move."

"I've got one-sixteenth of an inch play at any rate," said the garboard strake triumphantly; and so he had, and all the bottom of the ship felt a good deal easier for it.

"Then we're no good," sobbed the bottom rivets. "We were ordered--we were _ordered_--never to give, and we've given, and the sea will come in, and we'll all go to the bottom together! First we're blamed for everything unpleasant, and now we haven't the consolation of having done our work."

"Don't say I told you," whispered the steam consolingly; "but, between you and me and the cloud I last came from, it was bound to happen sooner or later. You _had_ to give a fraction, and you've given without knowing it. Now hold on, as before."

"What's the use?" a few hundred rivets chattered. "We've given--we've given; and the sooner we confess that we can't keep the ship together and go off our little heads, the easier it will be. No rivet forged could stand this strain."

"No one rivet was ever meant to. Share it among you," the steam answered.

"The others can have my share. I'm going to pull out," said a rivet in one of the forward plates.

"If you go, others will follow," hissed the steam. "There's nothing so contagious in a boat as rivets going. Why, I knew a little chap like you--he was an eighth of an inch fatter, though--on a steamer--to be sure, she was only twelve tons, now I come to think of it--in exactly the same place as you are. _He_ pulled out in a bit of a bobble of a sea, not half as bad as this, and he started all his friends on the same butt-strap, and the plate opened like a furnace door, and I had to climb into the nearest fog bank while the boat went down."

"Now that's peculiarly disgraceful," said the rivet. "Fatter than me, was he, and in a steamer not half our tonnage? Reedy little peg! I blush for the family, sir." He settled himself more firmly than ever in his place, and the steam chuckled.

"You see," he went on quite gravely, "a rivet, and especially a rivet in _your_ position, is really the _one_ indispensable part of the ship." The steam did not say that he had whispered the very same thing to every single piece of iron aboard. There is no sense in telling too much.

And all that while the little "Dimbula" pitched and chopped and swung and slewed, and lay down as though she were going to die, and got up as though she had been stung, and threw her nose round and round in circles half a dozen times as she dipped, for the gale was at its worst. It was inky black, in spite of the tearing white froth on the waves, and, to top everything, the rain began to fall in sheets, so that you could not see your hand before your face. This did not make much difference to the iron-work below, but it troubled the foremast a good deal.

"Now it's all finished," he said, dismally. "The conspiracy is too strong for us. There is nothing left but to--"

"Hurraar! Brrrraaah! Brrrrrrp!" roared the steam through the foghorn, till the decks quivered. "Don't be frightened below. It's only me, just throwing out a few words in case any one happens to be rolling round to-night,"

"You don't mean to say there's any one except _us_ on the sea in such weather?" said the funnel, in a husky snuffle.

"Scores of 'em," said the steam, clearing its throat. "Rrrrrraaa! Brraaaaa! Prrrrp! It's a trifle windy up here; and, great boilers, how it rains!"

"We're drowning," said the scuppers. They had been doing nothing else all night, but this steady thresh of rain above them seemed to be the end of the world.

"That's all right. We'll be easier in an hour or two. First the wind and then the rain; soon you may make sail again! Grrraaaaah! Drrrraaaa! Drrrrrp! I have a notion that the sea is going down already. If it does you'll learn something about rolling. We've only pitched till now. By the way, aren't you chaps in the hold a little easier than you were?"

There was just as much groaning and straining as ever, but it was not so loud or squeaky in tone; and when the ship quivered she did not jar stiffly, like a poker hit on the floor, but gave a supple little waggle, like a perfectly balanced golf club.

"We have made a most amazing discovery," said the stringers, one after another; "a discovery that entirely changes the situation. We have found, for the first time in the history of shipbuilding, that the inward pull of the deck beams and the outward thrust of the frames locks us, as it were, more closely in our places, and enables us to endure a strain which is entirely without parallel in the records of marine architecture."

The steam turned a laugh quickly into a roar up the foghorn. "What massive intellects you great stringers have!" he said, softly, when he had finished.

"We, also," began the deck beams, "are discoverers and geniuses. We are of opinion that the support of the hold-pillars materially helps _us_. We find that we lock upon them when we are subjected to a heavy and singular weight of sea above."

Here the "Dimbula" shot down a hollow, lying almost on her side, and righting at the bottom with a wrench and a spasm.

"In these cases--are you aware of this, steam?--the plating at the bows, and particularly at the stern,--we would also mention the floors beneath us,--helps _us_ to resist any tendency to spring." It was the frames who were speaking in the solemn and awed voice which people use when they have just come across something entirely new for the very first time.

"I'm only a poor, puffy little flutterer," said the steam, "but I have to stand a good deal of pressure in my business. It's all tremendously interesting. Tell us some more. You fellows are _so_ strong."

"You'll see," said the bow plates proudly. "Ready behind there! Here's the father and mother of waves coming! Sit tight, rivets all!" The great sluicing comber thundered by, but through all the scuffle and confusion the steam could hear the low, quick cries of the iron-work as the various strains took them--cries like these: "Easy now, easy! _Now_ push for all your strength! Hold out! Give a fraction! Hold up! Pull in! Shove crossways! Mind the strain at the ends! Grip now! Bite tight! Let the water get away from under, and there she goes."

The wave raced off into the darkness shouting, "Not bad that, if it's your first run!" and the drenched and ducked ship throbbed to the beat of the engines inside her. All three cylinders were wet and white with the salt spray that had come down through the engine-room hatch; there was white salt on the canvas-bound steam pipes, and even the bright work below was speckled and soiled; but the cylinders had learned to make the most of steam that was half water, and were pounding along cheerfully.

"How's the noblest outcome of human ingenuity hitting it?" said the steam, as he whirled through the engine room.

"Nothing for nothing in the world of woe," the cylinders answered, as if they had been working for centuries, "and precious little for seventy-five pounds head. We've made two knots this last hour and a quarter! Rather humiliating for eight hundred horse-power, isn't it?"

"Well, it's better than drifting astern, at any rate. You seem rather less--how shall I put it?--stiff in the back than you were."

"If you'd been hammered as we've been this night, you wouldn't be stiff--ffreff--ff--either. Theoreti--retti--retti--cally, of course, rigidity is _the_ thing. Purr--purr--practically, there has to be a little give and take. _We_ found that out by working on our sides for five minutes at a stretch--chch--chh. How's the weather?"

"Sea's going down fast," said the steam.

"Good business," said the high-pressure cylinder. "Whack her up along, boys. They've given us five pounds more steam;" and he began humming the first bars of "Said the young Obadiah to the old Obadiah," which, as you must have noticed, is a pet tune among engines not made for high speed. Racing liners with twin screws sing "The Turkish Patrol" and the overture to the "Bronze Horse" and "Madame Angot," till something goes wrong, and then they give Gounod's "Funeral March of a Marionette" with variations.

"You'll learn a song of your own some fine day," said the steam, as he flew up the foghorn for one last bellow.