"I just wanted to say, sir," he said, "that I likes the Yankee Jackies
very much; 'specially their candy an' chewin' gum. I was just wonderin'
if that last stick you give me was all----"

I emptied both pockets before I renewed my thanks to Melton and bade him
a final good night. There are strange ingredients entering into the
composition of the cement that is binding Britain and America together,
and if there is any objection to chewing gum it certainly cannot be on
the ground that it lacks adhesiveness.

CHAPTER III

"BACK FROM THE JAWS"

I had gone to the _Nairobi_, not because the rather routine stunt her
flotilla was on promised any excitement, but rather because of the
notable part she had played in the Jutland action and the fact that I
had been assured that there was still in her an officer who was said to
have figured prominently in the splendid account she had given of
herself on that occasion. As luck would have it, however, this officer
had been appointed to another destroyer only a day or two previously, so
that no veteran of the great action remained in the ward room. A canvass
of the ship's company revealed that one of the stoker petty officers was
a Jutland survivor, but before I could run him to cover some kind of a
light cruiser affair had occurred down Heligoland Bight way which called
for destroyer work in that direction, and the next two days, with the
flotilla creasing up the brine at high speed and everyone at Action
Stations most of the time, were not favourable for the "intimate
reminiscence" I was bent on drawing out.

It was not until the flotilla, salt-frosted and low in fuel, was
lounging along in the leisurely dalliance of half-speed on the way back
to base that I cornered Stoker Petty Officer Prince in the angle between
the foremost torpedo tubes and the starboard rail, and engaged him in
serious discussion of the shamefulness of supplying worn-out films to
the Depot Ship kinema. The second dog watch was only half gone, but in
the hour that elapsed before it was over there was no mention of
Jutland, or anything else connected with the war for that matter, though
the talk ran the full gamut from cabbages to kings. I mean this quite
literally, for he began by telling me of what his mother had raised in
her allotment at Ipswich, and was describing how, when he was on a
cruise in the _Clio_ ten years before the war, he had once shaken hands
with the King of Fiji, as eight bells