trap. I felt dead
certain---- But I'll tell you the whole yarn this evening."

Several bits of salvage from the "----'s" pleasure-yacht days figured in
the little feast K---- had spread that evening, and I remember
particularly that the Angostura was from a bottle Commodore P---- had
himself secured at the time when that incomparable bitter was distilled
in a little ramshackle pile-built factory at Ciudad Bolivar, on the
upper Orinoco. And the coffee that same genial _bon vivant_ had had
blended and sealed in glass by an old Arab merchant at Aden, while the
Benedictine had cost him a climb on foot through an infernally hot
August afternoon to an ancient monastery inland of Naples. It was
between sips of Benedictine--from a priceless little Morning
Glory-shaped curl of Phoenician glass, picked up in Antioch one winter
by the owner, and overlooked in the "stripping" operations--that K----
told me the story of the first of what he called his "Q-rious"
operations.

"There was a story attached to just about every little package of food
and drink P---- left in the yacht," said K----, unrolling the gold foil
from a cigar whose band bore the name of a Pinar del Rio factory which
is famed as accepting no order save from its small but highly select
list of private customers in various parts of the world; "and in the
several letters he has written begging me to make free with them he has
told me most of the yarns. The consequence was that, while the good
things lasted--they're most of them finished now--I was getting in the
way of enjoying eating and drinking them, telling where they came from
and how they were come by, just about as much as good old P---- himself
must have done. In fact, I think that their possible loss was about my
worst worry when I tried my first 'Q' stunt on.

"The success of any kind of stunt for harrying the U-boat is very
largely a matter of psychology, and this is especially so in the 'Q'
department. The main point of it is to make the enemy think you are more
harmless than you really are. There is nothing new in the idea, for it
is precisely the same stunt the old pirate of the Caribbean was on when
he concealed his gun-ports with strips of canvas and approached his
victims as a peaceful merchantman. As a matter of fact, I think it was
the Hun himself who started the game in this war, for I'm almost dead
sure that we had tried nothing of the kind on--in a systematic way, at
any rate--up to the time on