“And that,” said my informant, “put the lid on!” Boanerges went down lest he should be tempted to murder; and the tramp affirms she heard him rumbling beneath her, like an inverted thunder-storm, for fifteen minutes.

“All those tramps ought to be disarmed, and we ought to have all their guns,” said a voice out of a corner.

“What?  Still worrying over your ’mug’?” some one replied.

“He was a mug!” went on the man of one idea.  “If I’d had a couple of twelves even, I could have strafed him proper.  I don’t know whether I shall mutiny, or desert, or write to the First Sea Lord about it.”

“Strafe all Admiralty constructors to begin with. I could build a better boat with a 4-inch lathe and a sardine-tin than ——­,” the speaker named her by letter and number.

“That’s pure jealousy,” her commander explained to the company.  “Ever since I installed—­ahem!—­my patent electric washbasin he’s been intriguin’ to get her.  Why?  We know he doesn’t wash.  He’d only use the basin to keep beer in.”

UNDERWATER WORKS

However often one meets it, as in this war one meets it at every turn, one never gets used to the Holy Spirit of Man at his job.  The “common sweeper,” growling over his mug of tea that there was “nothing in sweepin’,” and these idly chaffing men, new shaved and attired, from the gates of Death which had let them through for the fiftieth time, were all of the same fabric—­incomprehensible, I should imagine, to the enemy.  And the stuff held good throughout all the world—­from the Dardanelles to the Baltic, where only a little while ago another batch of submarines had slipped in and begun to be busy.  I had spent some of the afternoon in looking through reports of submarine work in the Sea of Marmora.  They read like the diary of energetic weasels in an overcrowded chicken-run, and the results for each boat were tabulated something like a cricket score.  There were no maiden overs.  One came across jewels of price set in the flat official phraseology.  For example, one man who was describing some steps he was taking to remedy certain defects, interjected casually:  “At this point I had to go under for a little, as a man in a boat was trying to grab my periscope with his hand.”  No reference before or after to the said man or his fate.  Again:  “Came across a dhow with a Turkish skipper.  He seemed so miserable that I let him go.”  And elsewhere in those waters, a submarine overhauled a steamer full of Turkish passengers, some of whom, arguing on their allies’ lines, promptly leaped overboard.  Our boat fished them out and returned them, for she was not killing civilians.  In another affair, which included several ships (now at the bottom) and one submarine, the commander relaxes enough to note that:  “The men behaved very well under direct and flanking fire from rifles at about fifteen yards.”  This was not,