mly before him with
his solitary lacklustre eye. The Silent Menace, the ship's dog,
betrayed none of our childlike sentiment. Demobilisation was nothing
to him--he was too old a campaigner to let a little matter like that
agitate his habitual reserve. To us the recent period of hostilities
had been "The War," the only war in which we had ever been privileged
to fight; but to him it was just one of the numberless affrays of an
adventurous life, and, judging by the worn condition of his ears and
the veteran scars that tattooed his tail, some of the previous ones
had had their share of frightfulness. And to-morrow, no doubt, he will
try the game again.

It was the Third Hand who suddenly propounded the unsolvable question:
"Who's goin' to keep that there Menace?"

There was an almost universal chorus of "Me!" I say "almost universal"
because Jones, who is R.N.V.R. and educated, probably said, "I," and
the Chief Engineer was lighting his pipe and merely succeeded in
blowing the match out.

"You can't all have him," said the Third Hand, "so I think I'll take
him along with me. I knows a bit about dawgs."

There was instant and clamant disapproval, each one of us urging an
unquestionable claim to the guardianship of the orphan Menace. The
Steward said he was the only one with the ghost of a right to the dog;
had it not always been the Menace's custom to help him wash up the
plates and dishes? A Deck Hand, however, protested that as he had
eaten one of his mittens the Silent Menace was already in part his
property. The Mate and the Second-Engineer nearly came to blows about
it.

The question was still unsettled when the warrants arrived. As time
was short it was finally decided that whomsoever he should follow was
to be adjudged his future owner. We climbed ashore and spread out
fanwise, looking back and uttering those noises best calculated to
incline the unyielding heart of the Menace towards us. He himself rose
from the deck and strolled on to the wharf, where he stood coolly
regarding us. Without emotion his Cyclopean orb directed its gaze
from one to another till, midway between the Third Hand and
the Second-Engineer, it was observed to irradiate a sudden and
unaccustomed luminosity.

"Come along then, Menace," wheedled the Second.

"Yoicks, old dawg!" exclaimed the Third Hand, patting his knee
encouragingly.

But they had misinterpreted their Menace, for in the middle distance,
on a pile of timber directly be