"Calm?" said I. "Don't put that down to me. The very idea of being with the Grand Fleet is thrilling. It's the experience of a lifetime. And let me tell you right from personal experience that no sight of the land war can match the impressiveness and grandeur of the first view of the fleet." "I feel just as you do. The whole thing is a constant wonder. And some day the Germans may come out. Moreover, summer is now at hand, and we shall have a chance to use the deck more for sports. This long, raw, rainy winter doesn't permit much outdoor exercise. As soon as it gets warm, however, we shall have boxing matches on the deck between various members of the crew and the champions of the different ships. We have some good wrestlers, too. At present we are reduced to vaudeville competitions between our various vessels, and movies. I'm doing my best to get better movies. So we shan't fare badly after all." "When do you hold Sunday services?" "I have a service in the morning and another in the evening. Yes, I muster a pretty big congregation. But I'm afraid I've got to be going now, got to ram a little algebra into the head of one of the boys. See you at dinner." And our sky pilot was gone. May good luck go with him, and good friends be ever at hand to return him the friendliness he grants. They tell a story of a favourite chaplain who retired from the Navy to take charge of a parish on land. "Good-bye, sir," said one of the old salts to him, as he was leaving the ship. "Good-bye, sir. We'll all look to see you come back with a _bishop's rating_." XXV IN THE WIRELESS ROOM I haven't the slightest idea where the wireless room is or how to find it. All that I remember is that some kind soul took me by the hand, led me through various passages and down several ladders, and landed me in a small compartment which I felt sure must have been hollowed out of the keel. The wireless room of a great ship is, by the way, a kind of holy of holies, and my visit to it more than an ordinary privilege. There are as many messages in the air these times as there were wasps in the orchard in boyhood days after one had thrown a large, carefully-selected stone into the big nest. Messages in all keys and tunes, messages in all the known languages, messages in the most baffling of codes. Now the operator picks up a merchantman asking for advice in English, this against all rules and regulations; a request once answered by a profane somebody with "Use the code, you damned fool." At intervals the Eiffel Tower signals the time; listening to it, one seems to hear the clear, monotonous tick-tock of a giant pendulum. Now it is a British land station talking to a British squadron on watch in the North Sea, now the destroyers are at it, now one hears the great station at Wilhelmshaven sending out instructions to the submarine fleet in ambush off these isles.