He fairly bubbled over with delight when we offered him a bottle of champagne. Being homeward bound, he was in a frolicsome mood. A generous taste of the champagne, and he was ready to embrace us. He thought our supposed joke, which certainly would have been somewhat cruel, was the result of our being tipsy. He slapped me on the back, as one cheery skipper to another. "Captain, what a terrible fellow you are to have fooled me like that. But now I feel as though a stone had dropped from my heart." "Beware," I thought, "that your stone does not come back twice as heavy." He was such a cheery, convivial soul that I hated to break the bad news to him. I left the progress of events to do that. He wanted to have a look over our ship. So I ushered him aft to my cabin, and threw open the door. He took a step forward and recoiled. On the walls were pictures of the Kaiser, Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and Von Tirpitz, and a large German flag. "_Des allemands!_" he groaned. "Yes," I said, "we are Germans." "Then we are lost, _per Dieu_!" "Yes, _per Dieu_, you are lost." He stood with his forehead in one hand. His despair was both tragic and comic to behold. I tried as best I could to say a few words of cheer. "Well, Captain, you are not the only one to lose your ship during the war. To-morrow I, too, may be sunk, or the next day." He replied in the most doleful tone imaginable. "It is not so much the loss of my ship. But it's that I feel I have only myself to blame for it. In Valparaiso, where I lay in port with my _Dupleix_, two of my fellow captains warned me not to start until they had cabled our owners for final instructions and news about U-boats and cruisers. Possibly our owners would instruct us to keep off the usual course, they said. But the wind was fair, and I thought it best to take advantage of it. So, without waiting for a reply from our owners, I sailed from Valparaiso ahead of the other two captains. And now, because I did not take their advice, I have lost the _Dupleix_, my ship. _Mon Dieu_, what an ass I was! Now they will report it to my owners, and I will never get a ship again." "What were the names of your friends' ships?" "The _Antonin_----" "The _Antonin_ under Captain Lecoq?" "Yes. And the _La Rochefoucauld_?" "Orderly," I called in German, which the captain did not understand, "bring up captains numbers five and nine." While we waited, I invited my mournful guest to have some more champagne, but he refused and continued holding his head and moaning. A knock at the door. "Come in." And in walked the captains of the _Antonin_ and the _La Rochefoucauld_. They had been on board ten and three days respectively. The captain of the _Dupleix_ gaped. "_Eh, tout la France!_" he cried.