keep silent, troubled by a pain in one of his fragmentary teeth. All the men kept their few belongings tied in a bundle, ready to seize the instant trouble was at hand. The cook complained to Idaho that he had lost a gold watch when the _Lady Esther_ was torpedoed off the coast of France, and advised him paternally to keep his things handy. One of the oilers, a good-natured fellow of twenty-eight or nine, had been a soldier, having been invalided out of the service because of wounds received late in the summer on the Somme. An interesting lot of men for an American boy to be tossed with, particularly for a lad as intelligent and observing as our Idaho. The boy was pleased with his job and worked well. He did not have very much to do. Signalling aboard a convoyed ship, though a frequent business, is not an incessant one. He knew that his work would come at the entrance to the zone. Sometimes he picked up messages intended for others. "_Mt. Ida_, you are out of line," "_Vulcanian_, keep strictly to the prescribed zigzag plan." Now he would see the _Sicilian_ asking for advice; now there would be a kind of telegraphic tiff between two of the vessels of the "Keep further away, hang you" order. Twenty ships running without lights through the ambush of the sea, twenty ships, twenty pledges of life, satisfied hunger ... victory. In other days, one's world at sea was one's ship; a convoy is a kind of solar system of solitary worlds. Hour after hour, the assembled ships straggled across the great loneliness of the sea. The crew had a grievance. It was not against their officers, but against his majesty's government, against "a bloody lot of top hats." A recent regulation had forbidden sailors to import food into the United Kingdom, and all the dreams of stocking up "the missus'" larder with American abundance had come to naught. Idaho says that there was an engineer who was particularly fierce. "Don't we risk our lives, I arsk yer," he would say, "bringing stuff to fill their ruddy guts, and now they won't even let us bring in a bit of sugar for ourselves." The rest of the crew would take up the angry refrain; a mention of the food regulations was enough to set the entire crew "grousing" for hours. And then came trouble, real trouble.