cide to have no navy at all."

Imagination was not his long suit, so he had no card to follow with. But
he did glare.

After two weeks of waiting I got word from my very human London censor
that I might leave for the naval base. I left from Euston Station during
an air-raid. The station had been darkened hours earlier, and it was a
new kind of sport going around that big black place to locate the
cloak-room, and after you got the cloak-room to identify your baggage
from a big tumbled pile.

I lit a cigar, and as I did a policeman jumped me for showing a light.
Stopping to light it under my hat, a tall, able woman, dragging a trunk
by the strap, bowled into me. While we were in our compartments, the
train all made up, there came a banging of barrage guns--bang, bang,
bang--with now and then the boo-oom! of a bomb.

While we were waiting there we heard the crash of shrapnel coming
through the glass roof. By and by another bunch of shrapnel fell with a
fine ringing of metal on the concrete platform alongside the train. No
harm done. The raiders passed, the banging and the booming stopped; but
there was then no driver and stoker for the train. They had gone with
the second load of shrapnel, and we had to wait two hours while they dug
up a new crew.

After three and a half hours of deck-pacing on the steamer, and
twenty-two hours of sitting up straight in third-class wooden seats, I
made the naval base; and late at night though it was, there was a
British naval officer at the hotel to let me know I was to report next
morning to the British admiral in charge.

This admiral had a reputation in London for having no use for newspaper
men. When this staff-officer asked me if I had heard of his admiral
before, I told him what I heard in London. "He eats 'em alive," I was
told by a big London journalist, and I repeated that now, of course
without naming the journalist.

"And what do you think of that?" asked this staff-officer.

"If he tries to eat me alive I hope he chokes," I answered to that. I
figured he would tell his chief that, but there had been so much
boot-licking done by a couple of writers over there that, for the honor
of the craft, I thought somebody ought to have a wallop at these press
crushers once in a while.

This admiral is worth a paragraph, because he was a type. He was a
capable man up to his limitations; a good executive, a devotee to duty;
but he should have lived before printing-presses were inv