bore; and even if we do scare him
up--well, there are a good many more exciting things than dropping
'ash-cans' on a frightened Fritzie. It won't be a circumstance, for
instance, to that rough house we ran into at the 'White Tower' last
night when that boxful of French 'blue-devils' wouldn't stop singing
'Madelon' when the couchee-couchee dancer's turn began, and her friend,
the Russian colonel in the next box, started to dissolve the Entente
by----"

The captain broke off suddenly and set the alarm bell going as a
lynx-eyed lookout cut in with "Connin' tower o' submreen three points on
port bow," and, with much banging of boots on steel decks and ladders,
the ship had gone to "Action Stations" before a leisurely mounting
recognition rocket revealed the fact that the "enemy" was a friend,
doubtless a "co-huntress."

Although we were still far from where there was yet any chance of
encountering the U-boat which had attacked the convoy, there were two or
three alarms in the course of the next hour. The first was when we
altered our course to avoid a torpedo reported as running to strike our
port bow, to discover an instant later that the doughty _Spark_ was
turning away from a gambolling porpoise. The second was when some kind
of a long-necked sea-bird rose from a dive about two hundred yards on
the starboard beam and created an effect so like a finger-periscope with
its following "feather" that it drew a shell from the foremost gun which
all but blew it out of the water. It was my remarking the smartness with
which this gun was served that led the captain, when a floating mine was
reported a few minutes later, to order that sinister menace to be
destroyed by shell-fire rather than, as usual, by shots from a rifle.
All the guns which would bear were given an even start in the race to
hit the wickedly horned hemisphere as we brought it abeam at a range of
six or eight hundred yards; but the lean, keen crew of the pet on the
forecastle--splashing the target with their first shot and detonating it
with their second--won in a walk and left the others nothing but a
hundred-feet-high geyser of smoke-streaked spray tumbling above a heart
of flame to pump their tardier shells into.

The captain gazed down with a smile of affectionate pride to where the
winners, having trained their gun back amidships, were wiping its smoky
nose, sponging out its mouth, polishing its sleek barrel, and patting
its shiny breech, for all the world