Page:The Wireless Operator with the U.S. Coast Guard.djvu/125

 rush of heat would roast him. Yet the stokers stood directly before the open doors and worked at the glowing fires. Henry was surprised to see that they wore thick flannel shirts. Later he learned that without those shirts they could hardly have endured the heat, either. The wool shut out the terrible heat. These stokers were on duty only two hours or so at a time. Even such short watches were exhausting. And when Henry and his guide later came up from the fireroom, they noticed firemen, black with coal dust, stretched out here and there in the passages, sleeping soundly on the hard floors, where they had dropped when they came out of the fireroom.

The great boilers and the huge engines interested Henry greatly. How smoothly the pistons shot back and forth, how the various wheels turned endlessly, how the great shaft revolved ceaselessly. Henry saw the oilers passing from part to part of the engine-room, watching, oiling, tightening or loosening nuts, wiping this or that with oily rags, always alert, watching their engines as a mother watches her child. When Henry thought of the grimy coal passers he had just seen, conveying the fuel for the furnaces, and the men keeping the fires at red heat, and the engineers watching the great machines that drove the ship, and the sailors standing watch forward in the dark, and the helmsman at the