“Yamsi,” I should explain, is a mere code address, and I use it here symbolically.  I have seen commerce pretty close.  I know what it is worth, and I have no particular regard for commercial magnates, but one must protest against these Bumble-like proceedings.  Is it indignation at the loss of so many lives which is at work here?  Well, the American railroads kill very many people during one single year, I dare say.  Then why don’t these dignitaries come down on the presidents of their own railroads, of which one can’t say whether they are mere means of transportation or a sort of gambling game for the use of American plutocrats.  Is it only an ardent and, upon the whole, praiseworthy desire for information?  But the reports of the inquiry tell us that the august senators, though raising a lot of questions testifying to the complete innocence and even blankness of their minds, are unable to understand what the second officer is saying to them.  We are so informed by the press from the other side.  Even such a simple expression as that one of the look-out men was stationed in the “eyes of the ship” was too much for the senators of the land of graphic expression.  What it must have been in the more recondite matters I won’t even try to think, because I have no mind for smiles just now.  They were greatly exercised about the sound of explosions heard when half the ship was under water already.  Was there one?  Were there two?  They seemed to be smelling a rat there!  Has not some charitable soul told them (what even schoolboys who read sea stories know) that when a ship sinks from a leak like this, a deck or two is always blown up; and that when a steamship goes down by the head, the boilers may, and often do break adrift with a sound which resembles the sound of an explosion?  And they may, indeed, explode, for all I know.  In the only case I have seen of a steamship sinking there was such a sound, but I didn’t dive down after her to investigate.  She was not of 45,000 tons and declared unsinkable, but the sight was impressive enough.  I shall never forget the muffled, mysterious detonation, the sudden agitation of the sea round the slowly raised stern, and to this day I have in my eye the propeller, seen perfectly still in its frame against a clear evening sky.

But perhaps the second officer has explained to them by this time this and a few other little facts.  Though why an officer of the British merchant service should answer the questions of any king, emperor, autocrat, or senator of any foreign power (as to an event in which a British ship alone was concerned, and which did not even take place in the territorial waters of that power) passes my understanding.  The only authority he is bound to answer is the Board of Trade.  But with what face the Board of Trade, which, having made the regulations for 10,000 ton ships, put its dear old bald head under its wing for ten years, took it out only to shelve an important