Now then, I says to myself, thats a thing as wants altering. You perforate the edges of your plates to admit rivets, and so takes half their strength off praps more; then you puts, perhaps, hot rivets in, and they praps crystallises the iron only praps, mind, I dont say so, only the raw edges of the biler looked crystally and brittle. Well, then, some day comes a hextry pressure o steam, and up goes your biler busted, and spreading ruin and death and misery around.
Then how are we to fasten our biler plates, says you, if we dont rivet em? How should I know? I aint a scientific man I only stokes. Thats for you to find out. But you aint a-going to tell me, are you, that you scientific men and biler makers cant find no other way to make bilers only by riveting them? Say you bends the plates edges over, and hooks one into the other like tin sarspan makers does their tin. Theyd stand some strain that way, and you wouldnt weaken your plates. I aint a biler maker or I should try that dodge, I think; but there, thats only one way out of many as could be found by experiment.
Seems to me, sir, as if we English people hates anything new, and always wants to keep to what our fathers and grandfathers had before us. They went along and made their footmarks, and we go along after em, putting our feet in just the same spots, thinking it must be right, come what will of it.
Had to do with engines many years. Stoked locomotives and stationeries, agricultural and manufactories, and printing offices, and been down in the engine-rooms of steamers; and that lasts about the hottest and worst of all. Killing work, you know, for anybody, specially in a hot country, where every breath of air that comes down to you is already roasted, as it were,
down my face; but I turned away every time there was something large lifted, for I said to myself She must be under that! And then again and again, in my mind, I seemed to see the torn and crushed face of my darling, and her long curls dabbled in blood.
In the midst of the piled-up, blackened ruins bricks, mortar, tiles, lead, and ragged and split beams, huge pieces of wood snapped and torn like matches we toiled on hour after hour till the dark night came, when the gas pipes that had been laid bare and plugged were unstopped, and the gas lit, so that it flared and blazed and cast a strange wild light over the ruined place. There had been flames burst forth two or three times from parts of the ruins, but a few sprinklings from the fire engine in attendance had put them out; and as we worked on the rubbish grew cooler and cooler.
Some said that the child could not have been there, but the sight of her mother tearing out was sufficient, when once she got away from the kind people who had her in their house a house where but part of the windows had been broken by the explosion and came running to where I was at work, snatching at the bricks and wood, till I got two or three to take her back for I couldnt have left where I was to have saved my life. But I remember so well asking myself why it was that women will let down their back hair when theyre in a state of excitement, and make emselves look so wild.
By-and-by someone came to say how bad my wife was, and that she wanted to see me; but I felt that I couldnt go, and kept on in a fevered sort of way, work, work; and Ive thought since that if she had been dying it would have been all the same. However, I heard soon after that she seemed a little better; and I found out afterwards that a doctor there had given the poor thing something that seemed to calm her and she went to sleep.
It would have been a strong dose, though, that would have sent me off to sleep, as still on, hour after hour, I worked there, never tiring, but lifting beams that two or three men would have gone at, and tossing the rubbish away like so much straw.
The owners were kind enough, and did all they could to encourage the men, sending out beer and other refreshments; but the heap of stuff to move was something frightful, and more than once I felt quite in despair, and ready to sit down and weakly cry. But I was at it again the next moment, and working with the best of them.
Hadnt you better leave now? said one of my masters; Ill see that everything is done.
I gave him one look, and he laid his hand kindly on my shoulder, and said no more to me about going; and I heard him say, Poor fellow! to some one by him, as he turned away.
We came upon the biler quite half-a-dozen yards out of its place, ripped right across where the rivers went; while as for the engine, it was one curious bit of iron tangle rode, and bars, and pieces of iron and brass, twisted and turned and bent about, like so much string; and the great flywheel was broken in half-a-dozen places.
This showed us now where the great cellar-like place the stoke-hole was; and we worked down now towards that; but still clearing the way, for how could I tell where the child might be? But it was weary, slow work; every now and then rigging up shears, and fastening ropes and pulley and sheaf, to haul up some great piece of iron or a beam; and willing as every one was, we made very little progress in the dark night.