on, bending
forward. With his right hand on the speed control he shut off speed.

"Now, just sit where you are, Eph, until I come up again," advised the
young commander.

"Going to the surface?" demanded Somers, with interest.

"Pretty close," nodded Benson.

Calling Mr. Pollard to his aid, Jack began to operate the machinery that
admitted compressed air to the water tanks, expelling the water
gradually from those same tanks. This was the means by which the
submarine boat rose to the surface. All the time that he was doing this,
Jack Benson kept his keen glance on the submersion gauge. At last he
stopped.

"How is it up there, Eph?" he called, pleasantly.

"Why, of course there's a lot of good daylight filtering down through the
water now," Somers admitted.

Captain Jack went nimbly up the spiral stairway. Now, he had still
another piece of apparatus to call into play. This affair is known to
naval men as the periscope.

In effect, the periscope is a device which in the main is like a pipe;
it can be pushed up through the top of the conning tower, through a
special, water-proof cylinder, until the top of the periscope is a foot,
or less, above the surface of the water.

The top of this instrument is fitted with lenses and mirrors. Down
through the shaft of the periscope are other mirrors, which pass along
any image reflected on the uppermost mirror of all. At the bottom of
the periscope is the last mirror of the series, and, opening in upon
this, there is an eyepiece fitted with a lens.

As Captain Jack Benson applied his right eye to the eyepiece he was able
to see anything above the surface of the water that lay in any direction
that the periscope was pointing.

"Right opposite Spruce Beach, as the chart showed!" chuckled the young
commander. Under the magnifying effect of the eyepiece lens Benson
could see the beach, the flag-bedecked hotels, and the moving masses of
people on the shore. Yet, all this time, he was out at sea, more than
a mile from the beach. The periscope itself, if seen from a boat an
eighth of a mile away, would undoubtedly have been taken for a floating
bottle.

"Let me have a peep," demanded Somers.

Eph looked briefly, then chuckled:

"Must be thousands of people over yonder, wondering what on earth has
happened to us!"

"Do you make out the gunboat, at anchor to the north of the hotel
section?" inquired Captain Jack.

"Oh, yes. Say, they'll have an awakening on