"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.