No other engineering in the world can for one moment compare in vital importance with this. The conditions are so onerous, the complications are so many, the need for watchfulness is so great, that a new race of men has been bred to compete with them. The engineer ashore may, and does, have all his repairs done by other people; the engineer at sea must, in the very nature of things, be not only the prince of engine-drivers, whose care of his charge, under the most severe tests, not applied occasionally but continuously, is beyond all praise, but he must be ready at any moment by day or night to undertake the most radical repairs. With improvised adjuncts he must undertake on the instant to do such things with masses of steel that if they were described would sound impossible except to the large room and full equipment of a first-class factory ashore. Not only so, but the work must be done under conditions of heat, imperfect lighting, and cramped space that render the duty enormously more difficult.
Yes, it _must_ be done, because if not----? Well, they have taken away the steamship's masts, so that the sailor, even with the best ability and good-will in the world, can hardly get steerage way on the vessel by means of sails, and then there is a great ship, perhaps with an immense perishable cargo and a large number of passengers, lying like a log upon the ocean, at the mercy of currents that are most likely to be drifting her away out of the track of ships, away into the ocean solitudes that are to-day, owing to the method of following beaten tracks which is so universally pursued, more solitary than they have been for centuries.
The performance of duties like these calls for the highest qualities of mind and muscle ever possessed by men. The forces dealt with are so terrific, the dangers so great, that a weak man could not so much as face them, much less perform the wonderful pieces of work that are necessary in opposition to them. Occasionally a curt paragraph appears in the shipping papers, conveying to underwriters and owners the information that the steamship _So-and-so_, long overdue, has arrived, her broken-down machinery having been repaired by the engineer. Beneath that brief intimation lies a volume of tragic story--the dauntless conflict of man with fire, steam, and steel, and his final triumph over them. But these stories are never told as they ought to be. Some day, perhaps, an engineer-writer will step forth and unfold to an admiring world the Iliad of the engine-room. May I live to read it.