‘Yes, but they never come out of harbour. At least they didn’t in the old days. And if they do, _we_ sha’n’t be allowed a look-in. We shall be used for scouting—coaling all day and steaming all night. But we want those deck-tubes taken out all the same.’ ‘I’d like target-practice every week,’ says another. ‘Say four times our present allowance of practice-ammunition. It ’ud wear the guns out, but it ’ud pay.’ And so the talk goes on; varying with each ship. Some of them are all for torpedoes, and have submarine vaults the size of a small church devoted to this game; but we, being what we are, are mainly for guns, and the Gunner who is in charge of the torpedoes has a hard time of it when he runs his quarterly trials. ‘A beautiful thing,’ says he, as the silver-coloured devil flops from the tube and tears away towards the mark. . . . ‘Well, I’m blowed.’ The torpedo has sheered away to the left, and now is poisoning the air with its garlic-scented Holmes light, fifty yards from the target. ‘What did I tell you?’ says some one _sotto voce_. ‘We could have got in a dozen shots from the four inch while you were touching off that boomerang.’ ‘They’d hang you on the —— if you laughed at torpedoes.’ ‘I wouldn’t if ours were submerged, but with these deck-tubes one never knows how they’ll take the water. That thing must have canted as it fell.’ The Gunner looks grieved to the quick, but is presently consoled by a few score pounds of guncotton, and goes off with grapnels and batteries to practise ‘sweeping’ and ‘creeping’ at the mouth of the bay with a few score other boats. They mine and countermine expeditiously in the Channel Fleet. The process is a technical one, and need not be described here, for there is no necessity to make public either the area covered with mines or the time that it took to lay them. The Gunner returned with a detailed account and some fish that had been stunned by concussion. ‘It was a nice little show,’ he said. ‘A very nice little show. Did you happen to see our smoke?’ I had seen one end of Bantry Bay ripped up from its foundations, but did not inquire farther. ‘MAN AND ARM BOATS’