And now the Roads, windless and misty, the anchored merchantmen swung at different angles, in their gay fantasy of dazzle-paint, borrowing further motley from the mist, and leering grotesquely through the thin vapours. But for her lines, undeniably fine and graceful, _War Trident_ is the standardest of standards. Dazzle-painters have slapped their spite at her in lurid swathes and, not content, have draped her sheer in harlequin crenellations. Her low pipe-funnel upstands in rigid perpendicular. ("Chief! Pit yer haun' up an' feel if th' kettle's bilin'!") No masts break the long length of her, saving only a midship signal-pole that serves her wireless aerials and affords a hod-like perch for the look-out aloft. She is stark new, smooth of plating, and showing even the hammer-strokes on her rivets. Through the thin paint on her sides, marks and symbols of construction appear, the letters of her strakes painted in firm white, with here and there an unofficial shipyard embellishment--"Good old Jeemy Quin," or "Tae hell wi' the Kiser!" She is ready for sea, and life-boats and davits, swung outboard, tower overhead as the picket-launch draws up at her gaunt side. She is in ballast trim, and it is evident that her standard carpenters hold strictly to a rule that ignores a varying freeboard--the side ladder is short by eight feet, and only by middling the rungs (a leap at the bottom, a long swaying climb, and a drag at the top) are we able to clamber on board. A special 'drill' for conducting affairs with masters of brand-new ships should be devised immediately by Admiralty, and the mildest of Low-Church curates (trimmed by previous dire tortures to the utter limit of exasperation) be provided, on whom officials may be well practised. Usually the master has been hurried out of port by the last rivet driven home, with strange officers and the very weakest of new crews, in a ship jam-full of the newest 'gadjets,' and the least possible reserve of gear to work them. Quickly and bitterly the fourth sentence of Confession at Morning Prayer is recalled to him--the things undone crowd round, and there is nothing in the bare hull to serve as a makeshift. The engines and _auxiliaries_ (that, with a builder's man at every bearing, worked well on trials) now develop tricks and turns to keep the chief engineer and his fledgling juniors on the run; the mate cries "Kamerad" to all suggestions, pointing to his hopeless watch of one. (Eight deck: four in a watch, less one helmsman and two look-outs, equals one.) Add to the sum of difficulties that the captain has probably been ashore since he lost his last ship, and finds the new tactics and signals and zigzags unfamiliar; through it all the want of familiar little trifles and fixings (that go so far to help a ready action), sustains a feeling of irritation.