‘Fun! _We’ve_ got all the fun we want!’ growled a voice in the shadow. A stoker had risen silently as a seal for a breath of air, and stood, chest to the breeze, scanning the Fleet lights. ‘’Ullo! Wot’s the matter with _your_ condenser?’ said the Marine. ‘You’d better take your mucky ’ands off them hammick-cloths or you’ll be spoke to.’ ‘Our bunkers,’ said the figure, addressing his grievance to the sea-line, ‘are stuck all about like a lot o’ women’s pockets. They’re stuck about like a lot o’ bunion-plasters. That’s what our bunkers are.’ He slipped back into the darkness. Presently a signalman pattered by to relieve his mate on the bridge. ‘You’ll be ’ung,’ said the Marine, who was a wit, and by the same token something of a prophet. ‘Not if you’re anywhere in the crowd I won’t,’ was the retort, always in a cautious, ‘don’t-wake-him’ undertone. ‘Wot are you doin’ ’ere?’ ‘Never you mind. You go on up to the ’igh an’ lofty bridge an’ persecute your vocation. My Gawd! I wouldn’t be a signalman, not for ever so.’ When I met my friend next morning ‘persecuting his vocation’ as sentry over the lifebuoy aft neither he nor I recognised each other; but I owe him some very nice tales. WHEELING, CIRCLING, AND RETURNING Next day both Fleets were exercised at steam tactics, which is a noble game; but I was too interested in the life of my own cruiser, unfolding hour by hour, to be intelligently interested in evolutions. All I remember is that we were eternally taking up positions at fifteen knots an hour amid a crowd of other cruisers, all precisely alike, all still as death, each with a wedge of white foam under her nose; wheeling, circling, and returning. The battleships danced stately quadrilles by themselves in another part of the deep. We of the light horse did barn-dances about the windy floors; and precisely as couples in the ball-room fling a word over their shoulders, so we and our friends, whirling past to take up fresh stations, snapped out an unofficial sentence or two by means of our bridge-semaphores. Cruisers are wondrous human. In the afternoon the battleships overtook us, their white upperworks showing like icebergs as they topped the sea-line. Then we sobered our faces, and the engineers had rest, and at a wave of the Admiral’s flag off Land’s End our Fleet was split in twain. One half would go outside Ireland, toying with the weight of the Atlantic _en route_, to Blacksod Bay, while we turned up the Irish Channel to Lough Swilly. There we would coal, and wait for War. After that it would be blind man’s bluff within a three hundred and fifty mile ring of the Atlantic. We of Lough Swilly would try to catch the Blacksod Fleet, which was supposed to have a rendezvous of its own somewhere out at sea, before it could return to the shelter of the Bay. THE EXPERTS OF THE LOWER DECK