gale next day, and the Oberleutnant, who had an eye
for a pretty woman, sometimes wondered if the boat was picked up.

His mind revolved for a moment round certain incidents in connection
with that affair. A German sailor from the Submarine had been sent
onboard to place the bombs; he returned with cigars, a ham, and a
pretty silver clock. Also a box of sugar plums, half finished.

Von Sperrgebiet took the clock and the sugar plums. The cigars and the
ham (the labourer being worthy of his hire) he allowed the sailor to
keep.

But even Submarine warfare against unarmed shipping has its risks.
There was the ever-memorable incident of the British tug, and even now
von Sperrgebiet winced at the recollection. They had sighted a sailing
ship in tow of a tug at the entrance to the Channel; von Sperrgebiet
was proud of his mastery of the English tongue, and it was this small
vanity that led him to adopt tactics which differed somewhat from his
normal caution. He submerged until within a couple of hundred yards of
the approaching tow and then rose to the surface, dripping, like some
uncouth sea-monster. Armed with a revolver and a megaphone, and with
pleasurable anticipation in his heart, the Oberleutnant emerged from
the conning-tower with a view to a little preliminary banter with these
detested and unarmed English before administering a coup de grace. He
was just in time to see a stout, ungainly man tumbling aft along the
deck from the wheel-house of the tug. Raising a booted leg with
surprising agility, the stout man kicked off the shackle of the tow
rope, and as he did so over went the helm; the blunt-nosed tug,
released from her 3,000-ton burden, came straight for him like an angry
buffalo.

They were not forty yards apart when the tug turned, and quick as the
German coxswain was, the Submarine failed to avoid the stunning impact
of the bows. A revolver bullet crashed through the glass window of the
wheel-house; von Sperrgebiet had an instant's vision of a round face,
purple with rage, above the spokes of the wheel, and then the conning
tower's automatic hatchway closed. The Submarine was in diving trim,
and she submerged in the shortest time on record. They remained on the
bottom four hours while the sweating mechanics repaired the damaged
hydroplane gear and effected some temporary caulking round certain
plates that bulged ominously.

But von Sperrgebiet's hatred of England was real enough before this
i