pots on the eastern coast of Florida, and man
has made it one of the most expensive places in the world.

In other words, Spruce Beach is a paradise to look at. The climate, in
the winter months, is mild and balmy. Health grows rapidly at this
favored spot, and so fashion has seized upon it as her own. True, there
are yet a few cottages and boarding houses left where travelers of
moderate means may find board.

The whole air of Spruce Beach is one of holiday expectancy. The winter
visitors go there to enjoy themselves; they expect it and demand it.
They are gratified. From the first of December to the middle of March,
life at Spruce Beach makes you think of a great, jolly, unending picnic.
The greatest cause for regret is that more people of ordinary means
cannot go there and reap some of the plentiful harvest of fun and frolic.

The thousands of tourists, hotel guests and cottagers at Spruce Beach
had been promised that by the middle of December they would have a
treat the like of which few of them had ever enjoyed before. The
Pollard Submarine Boat Company, so named after David Pollard the
inventor--the company of which Jacob Farnum, the shipbuilder, was
president--had promised that by that date their newest, fastest and most
formidable submarine torpedo boat, the "Benson," should arrive at Spruce
Beach, there to begin a series of demonstrations and trials.

Still more extraordinary, the captain of this marvelous new submarine
craft of war was known to be a boy of sixteen--Jack Benson, after whom
the new navy-destroyer had been named.

Newspaper readers were beginning to be familiar with the name of Captain
Jack Benson. Though so young he had, after a stern apprenticeship,
actually succeeded in making himself a world-known expert in the handling
of submarine torpedo boats.

Those lighter readers of newspapers, who scoffed at the very idea of a
sixteen-year-old boy handling a costly submarine boat, were sometimes
reminded that the same thing happens at the United States Naval Academy
at Annapolis, where the young midshipmen are given instruction and often
are qualified as young experts along similar lines.

More remarkable still, as faithful readers of newspapers knew, Captain
Jack Benson had associated with him, on the new torpedo boat, two other
sixteen-year-old boys, by name Hal Hastings and Eph Somers. It was also
rumored, and nearly as often believed, that these three sea-bred young
Americans knew a