ourse, by a destroyer,
and the only thing he said was: 'Twenty-five time I 'ave insured, but
not _this_ time.... 'Ang it!'"

The trawlers lunged ahead toward the forlorn neutral. Our destroyer
nipped past us with that high-shouldered, terrier-like pouncing action
of the newer boats, and went ahead. A tramp in ballast, her propeller
half out of water, threshed along through the sallow haze.

"Lord! What a shot!" somebody said enviously. The men on the little
deck looked across at the slow-moving silhouette. One of them, a
cigarette behind his ear, smiled at a companion.

Then we went down--not as they go when they are pressed (the record, I
believe, is 50 feet in 50 seconds from top to bottom), but genteelly,
to an orchestra of appropriate sounds, roarings, and blowings, and
after the orders, which come from the commander alone, utter silence
and peace.

"There's the bottom. We bumped at fifty--fifty-two," he said.

"I didn't feel it."

"We'll try again. Watch the gauge, and you'll see it flick a little."

THE PRACTICE OF THE ART

It may have been so, but I was more interested in the faces, and above
all the eyes, all down the length of her. It was to them, of course,
the simplest of manoeuvres. They dropped into gear as no machine
could; but the training of years and the experience of the year leaped
up behind those steady eyes under the electrics in the shadow of the
tall motors, between the pipes and the curved hull, or glued to their
special gauges. One forgot the bodies altogether--but one will never
forget the eyes or the ennobled faces. One man I remember in
particular. On deck his was no more than a grave, rather striking
countenance, cast in the unmistakable petty officer's mould. Below, as
I saw him in profile handling a vital control, he looked like the Doge
of Venice, the Prior of some sternly-ruled monastic order, an old-time
Pope--anything that signifies trained and stored intellectual power
utterly and ascetically devoted to some vast impersonal end. And so
with a much younger man, who changed into such a monk as Frank Dicksee
used to draw. Only a couple of torpedo-men, not being in gear for the
moment, read an illustrated paper. Their time did not come till we
went up and got to business, which meant firing at our destroyer, and,
I think, keeping out of the light of a friend's torpedoes.

The attack and everything connected with it is solely the commander's
affair. He is the only one who gets