THE SHIP THAT FOUND HERSELF
"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 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 in reply. "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 different directions, to hold me steady. Is n't that so?"
[95]
