It came to me all at once what those stunned angry sailors on the street were talking of, and the hot wave of indignation--checked for an hour or two by the excitement of meeting and boarding a returning submarine--that had surged over me that afternoon when I first read the news of Captain Fryatt’s execution in the paper, welled up anew inside me and throbbed against my temples. I was conscious of the passing of one of a class of men whom I had learned to know and love during many years of intimate association--in craft stout and frail, on seas fair and stormy--and the fact that the death of this man had been compassed with a cold-blooded cynicism scarcely paralleled in modern history brought the significance of it home to me with especial poignancy. In a dull sort of way I had been conscious of a similar feeling every time I had read of the loss of merchant officers and crews from the inauguration of the submarine campaign, but only now had I come to understand how much of a hold these same sailor men had on my affection, what parts they had played in scores of the vivid incidents of my life that I cared most to dwell upon in memory. Three of the last ten years of my life had been spent upon the sea, I reflected, and of this time perhaps six months had been put in on one or another of the “floating palaces” of the main tourist routes, and not more than that aboard ships under the German, French, Dutch, or American flag. That left a good two years--more than seven hundred days and nights--spent aboard the smaller British merchantmen--tramps, coasters, colliers, traders, flat-bottomed river stern-wheelers--in out-of-the-way water-lanes of the world. Two years of my life--and what treasured years they were, too!--spent in the care of the bold, bluff, bronzed British merchant captains who drove “the swift shuttles of an Empire’s loom.” What strange seas they had steered me through, and what strange corners in the ports that served those seas! And what adventures they had run me into, and what scrapes got me out of! And what courtesy, what consideration--aye, even what tenderness in times of misadventure and sickness--had I not enjoyed at their hands! Pulling on my cardigan jacket, I “stood-by” at the hour of one--midnight by the sun-time, by which the ships of the sea still sail--and at the instant when the steamers in the harbour would have been sounding “Eight bells” had there been no lurking Zeppelins to guard against, leaned out of the open window till the indrifting fog blew sharp against my face and began my “watch.”