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The doors of all the state-rooms were open, and we could see through the thick plate-glass windows in them, which were all shut tight, that the ship was sinking more and more as the water came in. Sam climbed up into one of the after state-rooms, and said the outside water was nearly up to the stern; and pretty soon we looked up to the two portholes in the stern, and saw that they were covered with water; and as more and more water could be seen there, and as the light came through less easily, we knew that we were sinking under the surface of the ocean. ‘It’s a mighty good thing,’ said William Anderson, ‘that no water can get in here.’ William had a hopeful kind of mind, and always looked on the bright side of things; but I must say that I was dreadfully scared when I looked through those stern windows and saw water instead of sky. It began to get duskier and duskier as we sank lower and lower; but still we could see pretty well, for it’s astonishing how much light comes down through water. After a little while we noticed that the light remained about the same; and then William Anderson he sings out, ‘Hooray, we’ve stopped sinking!’ ‘What difference does that make?’ says I. ‘We must be thirty or forty feet under water, and more yet, for aught I know.’ ‘Yes, that may be,’ said he; ‘but it is clear that all the water has got into that compartment that can get in, and we have sunk just as far down as we are going.’ ‘But that don’t help matters,’ said I; ‘thirty or forty feet under water is just as bad as a thousand as to drowning a man.’ ‘Drowning!’ said William; ‘how are you going to be drowned? No water can get in here.’ ‘Nor no air, either,’ said I; ‘and people are drowned for want of air, as I take it.’ ‘It would be a queer sort of thing,’ said William, ‘to be drowned in the ocean and yet stay as dry as a chip. But it’s no use being worried about air. We’ve got air enough here to last us for ever so long. This stern compartment is the biggest in the ship, and it’s got lots of air in it. Just think of that hold! It must be nearly full of air. The stern compartment of the hold has got nothing in it but sewing-machines. I saw ’em loading her. The pig-iron was mostly amidships, or at least forward of this compartment. Now, there’s no kind of a cargo that’ll accommodate as much air as sewing-machines. They’re packed in wooden frames, not boxes, and don’t fill up half the room they take. There’s air all through and around ’em. It’s a very comforting thing to think the hold isn’t filled up solid with bales of cotton or wheat in bulk.’ It might be comforting, but I couldn’t get much good out of it. And now Sam, who’d been scrambling all over the cabin to see how things were going on, sung out that the water was leaking in a little again at the cabin door and around some of the iron frames of the windows. ‘It’s a lucky thing,’ said William Anderson, ‘that we didn’t sink any deeper, or the pressure of the water would have burst in those heavy glasses. And what we’ve got to do now is to stop up all the cracks. The more we work the livelier we’ll feel.’ We tore off more strips of sheets and went all round, stopping up cracks wherever we found them. ‘It’s fortunate,’ said William Anderson, ‘that Sam found that ladder, for we would have had hard work getting to the windows of the stern state-rooms without it; but by resting it on the bottom step of the stairs, which now happens to be the top one, we can get to any part of the cabin.’ I couldn’t help thinking that if Sam hadn’t found the ladder it would have been a good deal better for us; but I didn’t want to damp William’s spirits, and I said nothing.