donkey-engines, and fell to work in that howling wind and wet.
COALING: A PREPARATION FOR WAR
As a preparation for War next day, it seemed a little hard on the crew, who worked like sailors— there is no stronger term. From time to time a red-eyed black demon, with flashing teeth, shot into the ward-room for a bite and a drink, cried out the number of tons aboard, added a few pious words on the collier's appliances, and our bunkers ('Like a lot of bunion-plasters,' the stoker had said), and tore back to where the donkey-engines wheezed, the bags crashed, the shovels rasped and scraped, the boom whined and creaked, and the First Lieutenant, carved in pure jet, said precisely what occurred to him. Before the collier cast off a full-blooded battleship sent over a boat to take some measurements of her hatch. The boat was in charge of a Midshipman aged, perhaps, seventeen, though he looked younger. He came dripping into the ward-room bloodless, with livid lips, for he had been invalided from the Mediterranean full of Malta fever.
'And what are you in?' said our Captain, who chanced to pass by. 'The Victorious, sir, and a smart ship!' He drank his little glass of Marsala, swirled his dank boat-cloak about him, and went out serenely to take his boat home through the dark and the dismal welter.
Now the Victorious, she is some fourteen thousand nine hundred tons, and he who gave her her certificate
