"If a boat named the 'Hastings' were sold to some foreign government,"
laughed Jack Benson, "Hal, here, wouldn't say much about it. But call
a boat named the 'Somers,' after Eph, and then sell it, say, to the
Germans or the Japanese, and all of Eph's American gorge would come to
the surface. I'll wager he'd scheme to sink any submarine torpedo boat,
named after him, that was sold to go under a foreign flag."

"I hope we'll never have to sell any of our boats to foreign
governments," replied Jacob Farnum, earnestly. "And we won't either, if
the United States Government will give us half a show."

"That's just the trouble," grumbled Hal Hastings, breaking into the talk,
at last. "Confound it, why don't the people of this country run their
government more than they do? Four-fifths of the inventors who get up
great things that would put the United States on top, and keep us there,
have to go abroad to find a market for their inventions! If I could
invent a cannon to-day that would give all the power on earth to the
nation owning it, would the American Government buy it from me? No,
sir! I'd have to sell the cannon to England, Germany or Japan--or
else starve while Congress was talking of doing something about it in
the next session. Mr. Farnum, you have the finest, and the only real
submarine torpedo boat. Yet, if you want to go on building and
selling these craft, you'll have to dispose of most of them abroad."

"I hope not," responded the shipbuilder, solemnly.

Having said his say, Hal subsided. He was likely not to speak again for
an hour. As a class, engineers, having to listen much to noisy
machinery, are themselves silent.