aged by
explosions and a third destroyed! Read that short chapter of North Sea
history and add this, for a better knowledge of these paths of peace,
from the letter of an officer: 'Things began to move rapidly now.
There was a constant stream of reports coming from aloft. "Mine ahead,
Sir," "Mine on the port bow, Sir"; "There is one, Sir, right
alongside," and on looking over the bridge I saw a mine about two feet
below the surface and so close that we could have touched it with a
boat hook. . . . After an hour at last sighted the minesweepers, which
had already started work.'

"One may judge of these North Sea activities from the record of a
single lieutenant of the Naval Reserve who, besides attending to other
matters, destroyed forty or fifty mines, twice drove off an inquisitive
German Taube, attacked an equally inquisitive Zeppelin, twice rescued a
British seaplane and towed it into safety; rescued in June the crew of
a torpedoed trawler, sixteen men, also the crew of a sunk fishing
vessel; in July assisted two steamers that had been mined, saving
twenty-four of the sailors; in September assisted another steamer,
rescued three men from a mined trawler, towed a disabled Dutch steamer
and assisted in rescuing the passengers; in November assisted a
Norwegian steamer, rescued twenty-four men, and also a Greek steamer
which had been torpedoed and rescued forty.

"Some day it will all be chronicled, and not the least fascinating
record will be that of men who, perhaps, never fired a shot but
enlarged their vision of the recesses of the enemy mind in other ways
and met his craft by deeper craft, or navigated African rivers, fringed
by desolate mangrove swamps, in gunboats, or hammered down the
Mediterranean in East Coast trawlers, boys on their first command, or
saw with their own eyes things they had believed to be fables.

"'We travel about 1000 miles a week, most of it in practically unknown
seas, full of uncharted coral reefs, rocks, islands, whose existence
even is unknown. And by way of making things still more difficult we
keep meeting floating islands.

"'I always thought these things were merely yarns out of boys'
adventure books. However, I have seen five, the largest about the size
of a football field. They are covered with trees and palms, some of
them with ripe bananas on them. They get torn away from the swampy
parts of the mainland by the typhoons, which are very frequent at this
time of year.'