appear as though the sky was moving past her funnel in the direction it
wasn't. You see, I was working on the same principle which deceives you
when you think the standing train you are in is in motion when you see
the one on the next track start up.

"As the U-boat skipper's 'look-see' is often limited to a hurried sort
of a peep, I figured that if I could contrive to keep a rather
conspicuous imitation sky of canvas running past the masts and funnels
in the same direction she was going, only faster, it might create the
illusion--in the distorted 'worm's eye' vision of the man at the
periscope--that she was going in the opposite direction. I studied some
make-shift rigs from water-level through a periscope, and made up my
mind the scheme was worth trying."

K---- relighted his cigar and resumed with a sad smile.

"I still think the idea was good," he said, "but it took too complicated
an installation to carry it out, especially on a small craft with a low
freeboard. There were gearings and transmissions and rollers, and
heavens knows what not, needed to make the endless strip of canvas 'sky'
run smoothly, and there were also many wires and ropes. It was one or
the other of the latter which was responsible for the disaster, for
while the thing was still in the 'advanced experimental' stage a U-boat
popped up close by one day--probably a bold attempt on its skipper's
part to see if he really saw what he thought he had seen--and I spun the
'----' around on her tail (one of the nice things about her is that she
will turn in a smaller circle than most destroyers) and tried, first
choice, to ram him, and, second choice, to drop a depth-charge down the
hole he had ducked into. I was too late to ram by a few seconds, and
there must have been a good fathom or two of clearance between my keel
and the conning-tower I had driven for. The bridge and the two
periscopes he had 'turtle-necked' in showed clean and sharp in the clear
water as I leaned over the port side of the bridge--the easiest chance a
man ever had for kicking off a 'can' just where it ought to go. As I
turned to the depth-charge release I already had visions of him falling
apart like a cracked egg, with bobbing bubbles and howling Huns coming
up to the surface together. It was only a couple of days before that I
had picked up several British fishermen--all that were left alive after
a U-boat skipper had vented his morning hate by shelling the boat in
which they w