ome of the standing rigging of
the foremast--seeming to deflect inboard and downward slightly as a
consequence--missed the mainmast by a few feet, and struck squarely
against the side of the deckhouse on the poop.

"The scene immediately after the explosion of the bomb is photographed
indelibly on my memory; the events which followed are more of a jumble.
The detonation was a good deal less sharp than I had expected, and so
was the shock from it. The latter was not nearly so heavy as that from
many a wave that had crashed over her bows, but, coming from aft rather
than for'ard, the jolt had a distinctly different feel, and by a man
'tween decks would hardly have been mistaken for that from a sea.

"It was the flash of the explosion--a huge spurt of hot, red flame--that
was the really astonishing thing. It seemed to embrace the whole
afterpart of the ship, and everything one of the forked tongues of fire
was projected against burst into flame itself.

"The ramshackle deckhouse, which had been reduced to kindling wood by
the explosion, roared like a furnace in the middle of the poop. Even the
deck itself was blazing. I had once been near an incendiary bomb in a
London air raid, and knew that nothing else could have produced so
sudden and so fierce a fire.

"But I also knew that the first burst of flame is the worst in such a
case, and that most of the fire came from the inflammable stuff in the
bomb itself.

"As I had always heard that sand was better than water in putting out a
fire of this kind, and knowing we carried several barrels of it for
scrubbing the decks, I ordered it to be brought up and thrown on the
flames, but stood by on the bridge myself in case the skipper, who was
bawling down the engine-room voice-pipe for more steam, needed me for
anything else.

"Luckily the sand was close at hand, and they were scattering it from
buckets over the blazing deck within a minute or two. Except for the
debris of the deckhouse, the fire was put out almost as quickly as it
was started, and, between sand and water, even that was being rapidly
got under control, when suddenly the Hun, whom I had almost forgotten in
the rush of undoing his dirty work, flashed into sight again.

"The skipper had our ship zigzagging so short and sharp by this time
that her wake looked like the teeth of a big, crazy saw, and this the
Hun was unable to follow closely enough to get a fore-and-aft sight down
her as he had done the first tim