was like inside.  To begin with, the oily air was none too sweet, because every time we opened a hatch we shipped enough water to make the old hooker look like a start at a swimming tank; and then she was lurching so continuously and violently that to move six feet was an expedition.  The men were wonderful—­wonderful!  Each man at his allotted task, and—­what’s that English word?—­carrying on.  Our little cook couldn’t do a thing with the stove, might as well have tried to cook on a miniature earthquake; but he saw that all of us had something to eat—­doing his bit, game as could be.”

He paused again.  The Embankment was fading away in the dark.  A waiter appeared, and drew down the thick, light-proof curtains.

“Yes, the men were wonderful—­wonderful.  And there wasn’t very much sickness.  Let’s see, how far had I got?—­Since it was impossible to make any headway, we lay to for forty-eight hours.  The deck began to go the second morning, some of the plates being ripped right off.  And blow—­well, as I told you in the beginning, I never saw anything like it.  The disk of the sea was just one great ragged mass of foam being hurled through space by a wind screaming past with the voice and force of a million express trains.

[Sidenote:  The submarines run on the surface to save electricity.]

“Perhaps you are wondering why we didn’t submerge.  We simply couldn’t use up our electricity.  It takes oil and running on the surface to create the electric power, and we had a long, long journey ahead.  Then ice began to form on the superstructure, and we had to get out a crew to chop it off.  It was something of a job; there wasn’t much to hang on to, and the waves were still breaking over us.  But we freed her of the danger, and she went on—­

“We used to wonder where the other boys were, in the midst of all the racket.  One ship was drifting toward the New England coast, her compass smashed to flinders; others had run for Bermuda, others were still at sea.

[Sidenote:  Good weather at last.]

“Then we had three days of good easterly wind.  By jingo, but the good weather was great!  Were we glad to have it?—­oh, boy!  We had just got things shipshape again when we had another blow, but this second one was by no means as bad as the first.  And after that we had another spell of decent weather.  The crew used to start the phonograph and keep it going all day.

[Sidenote:  Reaching a friendly coast.]

“The weather was so good that I decided to keep right on to the harbor which was to be our base over here.  I had enough oil, plenty of water; the only possible danger was a shortage of provisions.  So I put us all on a ration, arranging to have the last grand meal on Christmas day.  Can you imagine Christmas on a little storm-bumped submarine some hundred miles off the coast?  A day or two more and we ran calmly into—­shall we say, ‘deleted’ harbor?

[Sidenote:  The men rejoice at food and baths.]