y precarious way over to the _Sherill_, and climbed
the ladders to her snug little bridge. My man was there already, whiling
away the time by rewriting an old college football song (he had been in
his freshman year at Michigan when America came into the war) to fit
destroyer work in the North Atlantic. I found him stuck at the end of
the second line of the first verse, because the only rhymes he could
think of for flotilla were Manila and camarilla, neither of which seemed
sufficiently opposite to be of use, and he was rather glad of an excuse
for putting the job by to await later inspiration.

I gave him a "lead" for the U-boat yarn he had lured me there to hear,
and he launched into it at once. This is the story the young signalman
of U.S.S. _Sherill_ told me, the while the red squares of the cottagers'
windows blinked blandly along the bank in the lengthening twilight and
the purple shadows of the western hills piled deeper and duskier upon
the "quiet waters of the River Lee."

* * * * *

"We were out on convoy," he said, speaking the first words slowly
between the teeth which held the string of the tobacco sack from which
the gently manipulated paper in his hand had been filled. "It was some
kind of a slow convoy--probably a collier or an oiler or two--and there
were only two of us on the job--the _McSmall_ and the _Sherill_. It was
just the usual ding-dong sort of a drudge up to about four in the
afternoon of the first day out, when the _McSmall_ made a signal that
she had sighted a submarine on the starboard bow of the convoy, distant
about five miles, and immediately stood off to the west to see if
anything like a strafe could be started. She was more than hull-down on
the horizon when I saw, by the way the angle of her funnels was
changing, that she was manoeuvring to shake loose a few 'cans' into
the oil-slick she had run into, but I remember distinctly that I felt
the jolt of the under-water explosions stronger than from many we had
kicked loose from the _Sherill_, and which had detonated only a hundred
yards or so off. It's just a little trick the depth-charge has. The
force of it seems to shoot out in streaks, just like an explosion in the
air, and you may feel it strong at a distance and much less at fairly
close range. So far as we ever learned, this opening salvo did not find
its target.

"Meanwhile the _Sherill_ was escorting to the best of her ability alone.
Or at leas