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Updated: June 6, 2025
At the foot of the hill the travellers saw the whole population of the neighborhood, who were lighting fire-boxes and discharging a few guns; then two of the prettiest of the village girls, dressed in white, came forward to offer Madame Graslin flowers and fruit. "To be thus received in this village!" she exclaimed, grasping the rector's hand as if she stood on the brink of a precipice.
Water was dear, and water-heaters were fitted to each engine, by which thirty-three per cent. of the water was again used, thus saving one third. The boilers were of the locomotive type, mostly of steel, to save weight, and thus reduce the cost of transit. The fire-boxes were also made of steel of very soft and ductile quality. A semi-portable engine was made for driving the wash mill.
There is not an ounce of coal aboard, the boiler-house is as clean and neat as a parlor, and no cinders fall upon the deck or awnings. In place of huge coal-bunkers, taking up half the vessel's carrying space, compact tanks above the furnaces hold all the liquid fuel. Pipes convey it automatically, much or little, as easily as regulating a water-tap, to the fire-boxes.
Then the chief engineer stumbled out no hat nor coat, his head all blood where a flying bolt had gashed him. Some of her bilge plates was loose, he said, and the water half up to the fire-boxes. Next a column of flame came pouring out of her companionway, which crisped up four of our boats and drove everybody for'ard. We knew then it was all up with us.
The begrimed warriors, whose destiny it was to ride these iron chargers, were also variously circumstanced. Some in their shirt sleeves busy with hammer and file at benches hard by; others raking out fire-boxes, or oiling machinery; all busy as bees, save the few, who, having completed their preparations, were buttoning up their jackets and awaiting the signal to charge.
Others were employed near them, on an engine more advanced, in putting on the wheels and placing the boilers and fire-boxes, while another gang were busy covering the boiler of a third engine with a coating of wood and felt, literally for the purpose of keeping it warm, or preventing its heat from escaping.
If it rises much higher it will flood the fire-boxes, and then all will be over, for there is not one boat left on the ship all were landed on the now invisible floe. But just as all hope was lost there came a faint hissing of steam, the pumps began slowly moving, and then settled down into their monotonous "chug-chug," the sweetest sound, that day, those desperate mariners had ever heard.
Sometimes they rose very high into freezing air, so high that the earth became a dull shadow specked with light. They saw the trains running in all directions with thin threads of smoke shining in the glare of the open fire-boxes.
The shape of the fire-box also secures more heat by having oblique sides which radiate more effectively into the oven beneath than if they were perpendicular, as illustrated below while also it is sunk into the oven, so as to radiate from three instead of from two sides, as in most other stoves, the front of whose fire-boxes with their grates are built so as to be the front of the stove itself.
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