Mr. Kemp seemed to be trembling as he hauled open the door of this second shed, and he lit a series of lanterns that illuminated the interior most elegantly.
“Well then,” he said. “What do you think of her?”
I looked and shook my head. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. Indeed, I suspected that nobody had ever seen the like. Sitting on a sort of wooden trestle was a weird contraption with the hull of a boat, but rather than a mast, a great cylindrical chimney, for the entire world like a top hat, thrust up to the wooden ceiling. Behind this chimney was a great metal box, apparently called a boiler, and connecting the two was a mass of pipes and levers and metal bits and pieces the function of I could only guess.
At the back of the hull was a huge wheel, with flat bits of wood s
