hored--they carry anchors too--a short
distance away, with three men left on her for an anchor watch, the idea
being to take them off later for a hot meal. But after the rest of us
were safe and warm and well fed aboard the mother ship, the increasing
winds came bowling over the increasing seas, and the crew of the sub had
to wait.

At intervals we could hear them emitting beseeching, doleful, disgusted
moans and shrieks and howls from her air-whistle. But it was too rough
for any little choo-choo boat to be battling around. It was 9.30 that
night before they could safely be taken off. They were a moderately
good-natured lot; but that was the blear-eyed trouble with making sub
trial trips with bad weather coming on--a man never knew about his
regular meals.

The supply-ship was quite a little institution herself. Approaching her
from shore the night before, her lights beneath the dull moon and thin,
drifting clouds had loomed up like a dancing-hall across the lonesome
harbor waters. When we got aboard, we found her the relic of what had
once been a fine block of a three-masted coaster; but moored forward and
aft she was now, as if for all time, and no longer showing stout spars
and weather-beaten canvas--nothing but two floors of white-painted
boarding above her old bulwarks.

She was a boarding-place, a sort of club, for the crew and attendants,
as well as a supply station for the submarines which in these New
England waters were being tried out for one of the warring Powers.
Voices and cigar-smoke as we stepped aboard, and more or less quiet
breathing, with partly closed and open living and sleeping rooms,
denoted that men were discussing, arguing, sleeping, and otherwise
passing a normal evening. Looking farther, we saw that down in the
insides of her--where formerly she stowed noble freights of coal or
lumber or, sometimes, hay and ice--were now a boiler and engine room,
and a good, big repair-shop.

This night, while the gale came howling and the sea rolling and the
solid rain sweeping against the sober old sides of our supply-ship--on
this night, the finest kind to be sitting in a warm cabin, we sat and,
while the smoke rolled high, aired our views of the real things in the
world; and the most real thing in the world just then being a submarine,
we got this:

"Danger? Of course, there's some danger. So is there danger in
bank-fishing, in log-jamming down in Maine, in mining deep down, and in
aeroplaning.