mportant. After
he had been at sea for a year he seemed a human machine, much of
the type of the destroyer as a steel machine--a thirty-knot human
machine, capable of three hundred or five hundred revolutions,
engines running smoothly, with no waste energy, slipping over the
waves and cutting through them; a quick man, quick of movement,
quick of comprehension and observation, of speech and of thought,
with a delightful self-possession--for there are many kinds--which is
instantly responsive with decision.

A telescope under his arm, too, as he received his guests. You liked
that. He keeps watch over the fleet himself when he is on the quarter-
deck. You had a feeling that nothing could happen in all his range of
vision, stretching down the "avenues of Dreadnoughts" to the light-
cruiser squadron, and escape his attention. It hardly seems possible
that he was ever bored. Everything around interests him. Energy he
has, electric energy in this electric age, this man chosen to command
the greatest war product of modern energy.

Fastened to the superstructure near the ladder to his quarters was a
new broom which South Africa had sent him. He was highly pleased
with the present; only the broom was Tromp's emblem, while Blake's
had been the whip. Possibly the South African Dutchmen, now
fighting on England's side, knew that he already had the whip and
they wanted him to have the Dutch broom, too.

He had been using both, and many other devices in his campaign
against von Tirpitz's "unter See" boats, as was illustrated by one of
the maps hung in his cabin. Quite different this from maps in a
general's headquarters, with the front trenches and support and
reserve trenches and the gun-positions marked in vari-coloured
pencillings. Instantly a submarine was sighted anywhere, Sir John
had word of it, and a dot went down on the spot where it had been
seen. In places the sea looked like a pepper-box cover. Dots were
plentiful outside the harbour where we were; but well outside, like flies
around sugar which they could not reach.

Seeing Sir John among his admirals and guests one had a glimpse of
the life of a sort of mysterious, busy brotherhood. I was still searching
for an admiral with white hair. If there were none among these
seniors, then all must be on shore. Spirit, I think, that is the word; the
spirit of youth, of corps, of service, of the sea, of a ready, buoyant
definiteness--yes, spirit was the word to characterize