went to call him on watch. It was
a happy inspiration which prompted me to volunteer to go down and stand
a part of his watch with him in the stokehold, for once on his own
"dung-hill," his restraint fell away from him and he spoke easily and
naturally of the things which had befallen him there and on the deck
above.

There is little in the small, neat compartment from which the oil fires
of a modern destroyer are fed and controlled to suggest the picture
which the name "stokehold" conjures up in the popular mind. There is no
coal, no grime, no sweating shovellers, no clanging doors. Under
ordinary conditions two leisurely moving men do all there is need of
doing, and with time to spare, and there are occasions at sea, in the
winter months, when the stokehold is a more comfortable refuge than the
chill fireless ward room. It was my remarking upon the grateful warmth
of the stokehold after the cold wet wind that was sweeping the deck,
which finally turned the current of Prince's reminiscence in the
direction I had been vainly endeavouring to deflect it for the last
hour.

"It's all comfy enough, sir, when she's loafing along at fifteen or
twenty knots," he said, slipping aside a "flap" and peering in at his
fires with the critical eye of a housewife surveying her oven of bread,
"but just tumble in some time when, while she already plugging away at
full speed, the engine-room rings up more steam. That's the time she's
just one little bit of hell down here, sir, with the white sizzle of the
fires turning the furnaces to a red that shows even with the lights on,
and the plates underfoot getting so hot that you have to keep dancing to
prevent the soles of your boots from catching fire. Why, long toward
morning of the night after Jutland----"

It didn't take much manoeuvring from that vantage to back him up to
the beginning for a fresh start of the story of what is unquestionably
one of the most remarkable, as it was one of the most successful, phases
of the Jutland destroyer action. The fact that, during the daylight
action between the battle cruisers, he had ample opportunity for
observation (through his being on deck standing by in the event of
emergency and without active duties to perform) makes him undoubtedly
one of the most valuable witnesses of the opening phase of this the
greatest of all naval battles. The story which I am setting down
connectedly, he told me in the comfortable intervals of his leisurely
fire-t