y of "slicking up" or "snugging down"; while the extent
of his culinary effort was limited to a kedgeree of half-boiled rice and
pale canned salmon, and a platter of eggs fried "straight up," according
to D----'s order, with the yolks glaring fish-eyedly at you from a
smooth, waxy expanse of congealed grease. D----, who was still somewhat
"introspective" himself, turned down the "straightups" straightaway,
bent a look that was more grieved than angry on the forlorn 'Arry, and
then, rising shiveringly, started edging along over the sodden divan
toward his cabin door.

"As principal medical officer of this ship," he said through chattering
teeth, "I prescribe the only treatment ever found to be efficacious in
such circumstances as the present--bunk, blankets, and hot toddy."

There were two bunks in D----'s narrow cabin, and it was not until we
had turned into these--he in the lower, I in the upper--that the
mounting glow of soul and body thawed the reserve which had again
threatened to grip him in the matter of where he came from, and set his
tongue wagging of his life on the old home farm, and from that to a
sketchy but vivid recital of things that he had done, and hoped still
to do, as the skipper of a British patrol boat. It is the vision that
the memory of that recital conjures up: D----, with a Balaclava helmet
pulled low over his ears, gesticulating excitedly up to where I, the
unblanketed portion of my anatomy shrouded to the eyes in a wool
duffel-coat, leaned out over the edge of the bunk above--that I can
never dwell on without laughing outright.

The story of the way in which it happened that D---- came over to get
into the game in the first place did not differ greatly from those I
have heard from a score or more of young Americans who, partly inspired
by a sense of duty and partly lured by the promise of adventure, sought
service in the British Army or Navy by passing themselves off as
Canadians. He had intended to enlist in the Army at first; but when he
found that six months or more might elapse before he would be sent to
the other side, he crossed at his own expense on the chance of avoiding
the delay. At the end of a disappointing month spent in trying to enlist
in some unit that had a reasonable expectation of going into active
service at once, the intervention of an old college friend--an able
young chemical engineer occupying a prominent post in Munitions--secured
him a sub-lieutenant's commission in