, and I used to run down from my home in
Lake Forest to business in Chicago in my own motor-boat on and off
during the summer. It was what I knew of the latter which got me on a
'M.L.' without any preliminary hanging about when I first came over
early in the war. What I knew about sailing has been all to the good
almost every day I have been at sea, from the time I lured on a U-boat
by ringing up my 'M.L.' as a disabled fishing-smack to the time when I
had to bring this poor little old girl into port under canvas after I
had knocked out her propellers with one of her own depth-charges." It
was a fantastically amusing tale, that last. "It was the culmination of
my experiments in scientific camouflage," said K----, with a baleful
smile. "Up to that time any contrivances to deceive the Hun were getting
more and more intricate right along; since then they have tended more
and more toward extreme simplicity. It was this way, you see, that I
happened to work up to that depth-charge crescendo. From the first I had
been striving to give the U-boat mixed impressions of me, especially on
the score of which way I was going. This, as I soon found out from
studying the thing in the proper way, is much easier to do in the case
of a man whose observation is limited to a few feet above the water than
in the case of one who has a more lofty coign of vantage to con from.
That is to say, it's much easier to convey false impressions, especially
regarding your direction, to a man with his eye to a periscope than to
one in the foretop of a battleship, to take the two extremes. Trying now
one thing and now another as I had more experience, I found that where
at first every shot fired at me was directed ahead with a more or less
approximate allowance for the ship's progress in that direction, after a
while they began to go oftener and oftener astern, indicating they were
confused as to my rate of change. It was just as I was about to put the
crowning touch on my efforts in 'mixing direction' that the trouble
occurred. As the experiments with this particular contrivance never went
any further, there will hardly be any harm in my telling you what it was
and how it worked.

"I had already, with the aid of a couple of slanting fins, attached
something after the fashion of bilge-keels, only just below the
water-line on either quarter, worked up a fairly satisfactory 'bow wave'
aft, and I was endeavouring to supplement this by a scheme for making it