As a preparation for War next day, it seemed a little hard on the crew, who worked like sailors—there is no stronger term. From time to time a red-eyed black demon, with flashing teeth, shot into the ward-room for a bite and a drink, cried out the number of tons aboard, added a few pious words on the collier’s appliances, and our bunkers (‘Like a lot of bunion-plasters,’ the stoker had said), and tore back to where the donkey-engines wheezed, the bags crashed, the shovels rasped and scraped, the boom whined and creaked, and the First Lieutenant, carved in pure jet, said precisely what occurred to him. Before the collier cast off a full-blooded battleship sent over a boat to take some measurements of her hatch. The boat was in charge of a Midshipman aged, perhaps, seventeen, though he looked younger. He came dripping into the ward-room—bloodless, with livid lips, for he had been invalided from the Mediterranean full of Malta fever. ‘And what are you in?’ said our Captain, who chanced to pass by. ‘The _Victorious_, sir, and a smart ship!’ He drank his little glass of Marsala, swirled his dank boat-cloak about him, and went out serenely to take his boat home through the dark and the dismal welter. Now the _Victorious_, she is some fourteen thousand nine hundred tons, and he who gave her her certificate was maybe ten stone two—with a touch of Malta fever on him! THE WARD-ROOM DISPORTED ITSELF We cleaned up at last; the First Lieutenant’s face relaxed a little, and some one called for the instruments of music. Out came two violins, a mandoline, and bagpipes, and the ward-room disported itself among tunes of three Nations till War should be declared. In the middle of a scientific experiment as to how the ship’s kitten might be affected by bagpipes that hour struck, and even more swiftly than pussy fled under the sofa the trim mess-jackets melted away, the chaff ceased, the hull shivered to the power of the steam-capstan, the slapping of the water on our sides grew, and we glided through the moored Fleet to the mouth of Lough Swilly. Our orders were to follow and support another cruiser who had been already despatched towards Blacksod Bay to observe the enemy—or rather that cruiser who was bearing news of the outbreak of War to the enemy’s Fleet.