Stories of the Ships

lor during the last year; but it has seemed to me to be the latter-probably because he has somewhat more time

re his eyes as the time of his big moment approaches. With the sailor it is different. Although, first and last, the part that he is playing and will play in winning through is every bit as important as that of the soldier, his hate of the Hun is rather more impe

to get acquainted on my part, and was ventured with no expectation of drawing a serious answer. I was not as familiar then as I have become since with the material they are making the young Yankee sailor of, however. He turned on me a keen eye, with wrinkles at the corners which I was quite right in s

waking up to the fact in the States that to call a man 'politician' is one degree worse than to call him a ---- --. It took them a year or two of war to learn that in England, and we didn't profit much by their example. Another thing-it looks like Americans-or at least those of us as have come across to this side-are going to have a fair chance to discover that the natives of these little islands are more or less the same kind of animals the Yanks are after all. We've never had that chance in the last hundred and forty years. Instead, we've been taught from our cradles to nurse a grudge th

neck of the Atlantic where he works into what may well be termed a "marine hell" for the pirates. If he is in one or the other of these branches of the service, too, the fact that he has based in a South of Ireland port has given him a liberal education in the affairs of that "disthreshful country" and stirred in him the deepest abominat

a man of two or three enlistments-and these, because of the great dilution of new men which has become imperative with the expansion of the Navy, are not encountered very often-the effect of the composite was heightened by a picture of the British bluejacket as the American had met him on the waterfront of this or that foreign port. It goes without saying that the incarnation of that kind of a composite didn't seem a very promising individual for the Yankee sailor to make friends with. This creature of fanc

s, whose bases have been more convenient to England and with chances of leave turning up rather oftener. Their main, almost their only, point of contact, therefore, has been the British bluejacket. Everything considered, perhaps there could not have been a better one. No

n of both Navies had had a good many chances to see each other handling their ships. From that alone a deep mutual respect was born, and it was on that solid foundation that the present astonishingly friendly relations between the men of the two allied Navies is based. The British, with four years of war experience behind them, were doing things with their ships, quite in the ordinary course of the day's work, that the Americans had never reckoned on attempting save in emergency. The shooting and the general efficiency o

e of the Grand Fleet even to-day. The sun-pickled phiz of the old sea-dog crinkled with a grin of sheer delight and wonder as the lean cruisers, each a mass of turrets, funnels, and tripod mast between tossing bow-wave and foaming wake, dashed in and out of the spreading smoke-screens with a unity of movement t

rs doing half the speed of them battle cruisers. And as for keeping station-it was just a case of devil take the hindmost. But these Johnnies here would go straight throu

ks of the ships of the Grand Fleet and the men who man them, I would simply quote th

th spoke the same language, and it was not very far from that to the "pal-ling" stage. Then they began to box and play occasional games of "soccer" together, and, where either could not play the other's sport, to give attention to baseball or "rugger," as the case might be, with the idea of trying to

" to active affection; and to describe how the Americans' feelings have run the same gamut would be merely to tell the story in reverse. But I cannot refrain from setting down the personal tribu

erican Navy had been boxing six, and a number of other variations in rules, he had done extremely well, having lost but a single bout, and that by being slightly out-pointed. He was still nursing a black eye from this latter contest-in which his sportsmanlike conduct no less than his cleverness had won the admiration of every one present-when I asked him if he had been satisfied w

"regular feller" to apply to a mate who has met

f the various canteens that have been provided for their comfort. But it has been none of these that has made the greatest appeal to them, but rather those at first rare but now increasingly frequent visits to an English or a Scottish home. I don't mean the boat-on-the-river-with-band and the tea-party-on-the-lawn-of-some-ancestral-castle kind of thing, which are all very well as far as they go; but rather the quiet, unostentatious hospitality of a British home of somewhere near the same c

e-of the American submarine in which I was recently out on its regular North Atlantic patrol told me how much the visit he had been privileged to make to a little English home in Liverpool had

e idea it was, except that the Sinn Feiners had nothing to do with it. Now the ordinary way to have handled them would have been to bend each flag to separate halyards, and to hoist and lower independently. But some man with a head on his shoulders (possibly he had been a sailor) evidently had the run of the show, and what had been done was this: Taking two crosspieces, he had bent the flags to the two lines joining their ends. Then a single halyard, rigged to run over a block to the upper crosspiece

hat particular little "bunting hoist," but I do know that the sentiment my young subma

LIAM CLOWES AN

D BECCLES

riber'

o the original. The first line is the ori

ill there was an

ll there was an

nkin' pyrit down

nkin' pyrit down

een right along

een right along

gsberg. Just

gsberg. Just

the fo'c'sl'e de

the fo'c'sle dec

berg turning up

berg turning up

n the Emden sho

n the Emden sho

admitted grudi

admitted grudgin

and carried--and o

and carried--and o

is own natural s

is own natural s

ked aboard the

ked aboard th

rines, ranged cl

arines, ranged c

ttleship, while

attleship, while