ade to the Elbe and
play the deuce with the shipping there. But the trouble is that I
doubt if there's a soul in our fleet who knows those channels. _We_
haven't coasters there; and, as to yachts, it's a most unlikely game
for an English yacht to play at; but it does so happen that I have a
fancy for that sort of thing and would have explored those channels
in the ordinary course.' I began to see his drift.

'Now for the islands. I was rather stumped there at first, I grant,
because, though there are lashings of sand behind them, and the same
sort of intersecting channels, yet there seems nothing important to
guard or attack.

'Why shouldn't a stranger ramble as he pleases through them? Still
Dollmann had his headquarters there, and I was sure that had some
meaning. Then it struck me that the same point held good, for that
strip of Frisian coast adjoins the estuaries, and would also form a
splendid base for raiding midgets, which could travel unseen right
through from the Ems to the Jade, and so to the Elbe, as by a covered
way between a line of forts.

'Now here again it's an unknown land to us. Plenty of local galliots
travel it, but strangers never, I should say. Perhaps at he most an
occasional foreign yacht gropes in at one of the gaps between the
islands for shelter from bad weather, and is precious lucky to get in
safe. Once again, it was my fad to like such places, and Dollmann
cleared me out. He's not a German, but he's in with Germans, and
naval Germans too. He's established on that coast, and knows it by
heart. And he tried to drown me. Now what do you think?' He gazed at
me long and anxiously.

IX. I Sign Articles

IT was not an easy question to answer, for the affair was utterly
outside all my experience; its background the sea, and its actual
scene a region of the sea of which I was blankly ignorant. There were
other difficulties that I could see perhaps better than Davies, an
enthusiast with hobbies, who had been brooding in solitude over his
dangerous adventure. Yet both narrative and theory (which have lost,
I fear, in interpretation to the reader) had strongly affected me;
his forcible roughnesses, tricks of manner, sudden bursts of ardour,
sudden retreats into shyness, making up a charm I cannot render. I
found myself continually trying to see the man through the boy, to
distinguish sober judgement from the hot-headed vagaries of youth.
Not that I dreamed for a moment of dismissing the