"Can't you keep still up there?" said the deckbeams. "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 outside that comes and hits me on the head."
"Tell that to the shipwrights. You've been in position 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.
"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 cannot 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 proper, 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