ay does blend
best with a deep-sea background.

She had the prettiest little lounging-room. Our officers retained
that--for even in war officers must have some place aboard ship to
gather for a smoke and gossip--but they threw out the large, lovely fat
pieces of furniture. In case of submarine attack or an order to abandon
ship, the men might want to make a passage of that room in a hurry and
no time there--in the dark it might be--to be falling over chairs and
tables.

There was a sun-parlor, a large, splendid room with wide windows and the
deck on three sides. There were thick draperies, filmy laces, and many
easy chairs. In the old days cabin passengers used to sit there and
absorb the soft tropic breezes while digesting their breakfasts. An army
quartermaster-captain surveyed it with our naval officer. "Swell," said
the Q. M. C. "We'll haul down that plush and fluffy stuff, dump those
chairs and rugs over the side, plant my desk here, my chief clerk's
there, my other clerks' desks over there, open those fine wide windows
and let the north Atlantic breezes blow on our beaded brows while we're
doing our paper work. Fine!"

Our naval officer did that and a hundred other things to the inside and
outside of the beautiful ship and reported her fit for transport
service, or as fit as ever a made-over ship could be made to be,
whereupon he was ordered to take her to such and such a dock in such and
such a port--which he did. Then many large, heavy cases were lowered
into her hold, and troops and troops and more troops filed aboard and
took up what was left of the spaces between decks with themselves and
their war gear.

She lay then with her water-line a foot deeper than anybody around there
ever remembered seeing her in her swell passenger days; then she shoved
out into the stream and kicked her way down the harbor, and as she did
so, though there was not a single trooper's head showing above her rail,
everybody seemed to know. Passing tugs, motor-boats, ferry-boats blew
their whistles--every kind of a boat that had a whistle blew it--and
there was an excursion boat loaded down with women and children. Her
band had been playing ragtime, but it suddenly stopped and broke into
"Good-by, Good Luck, God Bless You," to the troop-ship bound for France.

There was a war-ship waiting below--not the biggest by a good deal in
our fleet, but big enough to have hope one day of firing her broadside
on the battle-line. But the gre