r and
disrupted the colour in the mass as to make our vessels less easy to
hit. If not invisible against average backgrounds, the dazzlers have
done their work so well that we are at least partially lost in every
elongation.

The mystery withheld from us--the system of our decoration--has done
much to ease the rigours of our war-time sea-life. In argument and
discussion on its origin and purpose we have found a topic, almost as
unfailing in its interest as the record day's run of the old sailing
ships. We are agreed that it is a brave martial coat we wear, but are
divided in our theories of production. How is it done? By what shrewd
system are we controlled that no two ships are quite alike in their
splendour? We know that instructions come from a department of the
Admiralty to the dockyard painters, in many cases by telegraph. Is there
a system of abbreviations, a colourist's shorthand, or are there
maritime Heralds in Whitehall who blazon our arms for the guidance of
the rude dockside painters? It can be worked out in fine and sonorous
proportions:

For s.s. CORNCRIX

_Party per pale, a pale; first, gules, a fesse
dancette, sable; second, vert, bendy, lozengy,
purpure cottised with nodules of the first; third,
sable, three billets bendwise in fesse, or: sur
tout de tout, a barber's pole cockbilled on a
sinking gasometer, all proper._ For motto: "_Doing
them in the eye._"

One wonders if our old conservatism, our clinging to the past, shall
persist long after the time of strife has gone; if, in the years when
war is a memory and the time comes to deck our ships in pre-war symmetry
and grace of black hulls and white-painted deck-work and red funnels and
all the gallant show of it, some old masters among us may object to the
change.

"Well, have it as you like," they may say. "I was brought up in the good
old-fashioned cubist system o' ship painting--fine patterns o' reds an'
greens an' Ricketts' blue, an' brandy-ball stripes an' that! None o'
your damned newfangled ideas of one-colour sections for me! . . .
_Huh!_. . . And black hulls, too! . . . Black! A funeral outfit! . . .
No, sir! I may be wrong, but anyway, I'm too old now to chop and change
about!"

If we have become reconciled to the weird patterns of our war-paint,
every instinct of seafaring that is in us rebels against the new naming
of our ships. Is it bu