" said Yeovil; "things have to be
righted, which is a different matter."

"What d'y'mean?" said the fisherman, who did not like to have his
assertions taken up and shaken into shape.

"We have given a clever and domineering people a chance to plant
themselves down as masters in our land; I don't imagine that they are
going to give us an easy chance to push them out. To do that we shall
have to be a little cleverer than they are, a little harder, a little
fiercer, and a good deal more self-sacrificing than we have been in my
lifetime or in yours."

"We'll be that, right enough," said the fisherman; "we mean business this
time. The last war wasn't a war, it was a snap. We weren't prepared and
they were. That won't happen again, bless you. I know what I'm talking
about. I go up and down the country, and I hear what people are saying."

Yeovil privately doubted if he ever heard anything but his own opinions.

"It stands to reason," continued the fisherman, "that a highly civilised
race like ours, with the record that we've had for leading the whole
world, is not going to be held under for long by a lot of damned sausage-
eating Germans. Don't you believe it! I know what I'm talking about.
I've travelled about the world a bit."

Yeovil shrewdly suspected that the world travels amounted to nothing more
than a trip to the United States and perhaps the Channel Islands, with,
possibly, a week or fortnight in Paris.

"It isn't the past we've got to think of, it's the future," said Yeovil.
"Other maritime Powers had pasts to look back on; Spain and Holland, for
instance. The past didn't help them when they let their sea-sovereignty
slip from them. That is a matter of history and not very distant history
either."

"Ah, that's where you make a mistake," said the other; "our
sea-sovereignty hasn't slipped from us, and won't do, neither. There's
the British Empire beyond the seas; Canada, Australia, New Zealand, East
Africa."

He rolled the names round his tongue with obvious relish.

"If it was a list of first-class battleships, and armoured cruisers and
destroyers and airships that you were reeling off, there would be some
comfort and hope in the situation," said Yeovil; "the loyalty of the
colonies is a splendid thing, but it is only pathetically splendid
because it can do so little to recover for us what we've lost. Against
the Zeppelin air fleet, and the Dreadnought sea squadrons and the new
Gelberhaus cru