ree times I was completely drenched in groping forward from the
after-superstructure to the ward-room, under the bridge, so that I was a
good deal inclined to take it as a joke--and a rather ill-timed one at
that--when an ensign about to turn in on one of the transoms muttered
something about being thankful that we were going to have _one_ quiet
night when a man could snatch a wink of sleep. I asked him if he
referred to the night we expected to be in port waiting for the
_Lymptania_, but the fact that he had already dozed off proved that he
really had not been trying to be funny at my expense. Indeed, it was a
fairly quiet night, as nights go in destroyers; but, even so, I needed
a good high sideboard to keep from rolling out of the captain's bunk,
and then two sofa pillows and my overcoat to keep from pulping my
shoulder against the sideboard.

We were still sliding easily along at the same comfortable umpteen knots
in the morning, but with the breaking of the new day a subtle change had
come over the spirit of the ship. It was just such a change as one might
observe in a hunter as he passes from a plain, where there is little
cover, to a wood where every tree and bush may hide potential quarry.
And that, indeed, was precisely the way it was with us. The night before
we were "on our way"; this morning we were ploughing waters where
U-boats were _known_ to be operating. It was only a couple of days
previously that the good old _Carpathia_ had been put down, and not many
hours had passed since then but what brought word, by one or another of
the almost countless ways that have been devised to trace them, of an
enemy submarine working in those waters. We were ready enough the night
before, ready for anything that might have turned up; but this morning
we were more than that.

There was a new tenseness now, and a feeling in the air like that which
follows the click-click after a trigger is set to "hair." It was as
though everyone, everything, even the good little _Zip_ herself, was
crouched for a spring.

There was an amusing little incident I chanced to see which illustrates
the keenness of the spirit animating the men even in the moments of
waiting. A favourable course had left the deck unswept by water for an
hour, and a half-dozen boys, off watch, but too restless to turn in,
were trying to kill time by helping the cook peel potatoes. It was one
of these whom I saw stand up, take several swift strides forward across