The Junior Watch-keeper entered the Wardroom and rang the bell with an air of gloomy mystery. "The Russians are coming," he announced. "Cocktail, please, waiter." The Young Doctor looked up from the year-old ’Bradshaw’ with which he was wont to enliven moments of depression by arranging mythical week-ends at friends’ houses in various parts of England. It was a dreary amusement, and, conducted off the coast of Russian Tartary, stamped him as the possessor of no small imaginative powers. "Who said so?" "Skipper: three Russian Destroyers, an’ we’re to invite them to dinner, an’ there’s nothing to eat." The Junior Watch-keeper managed the affairs of the Mess for that quarter. "Those chaps feed like fighting-cocks," observed the Assistant Paymaster. "Let’s send for the Messman." The Junior Watch-keeper applied himself to his cocktail in silence, and the Celestial bandit who, in consideration of a monthly levy of thirty dollars per head, starved or poisoned them according to his whim, appeared in the doorway. The Mess broached the subject with quailing hearts; it was proposed to dine the representatives of a foreign Power. Could he for once rise to the occasion and produce a suitable repast? The Oriental summed up the situation with impassive brevity— "No can do." "Oh, rot!" said the Junior Watch-keeper, who up to this juncture had been gracefully pursuing the olive at the bottom of his glass with the tip of his tongue. "Pull your socks up, Ah Chee, an’ think of something." The Messman brooded darkly. "S’pose you go shore-side, catchee salmon, catchee snipe, pl’aps can do." "By Jove, yes," said the A.P., rising and walking to the scuttle. "We never thought of that. But it’s a God-forsaken place—look at it." The ship was anchored in a little bay off the mouth of a shallow river. On one side the ground rose abruptly to a bleak promontory, and on the other stretched a waste of sand-dunes. Inland not a tree or vestige of human habitation broke the dreary expanse of plain, which was covered with stunted bushes and rolled away to a range of low hills in the distance. "All very fine to talk about salmon," said the Young Doctor, "but there isn’t a rod in the ship, and no one could use it if there was." "Make one," suggested the Junior Watchkeeper, with cheerful resource begotten of cocktails. "But flies—? A rod’s no good without flies and things." "I’ll make a spinner. They won’t take a fly in these parts, a fellow told me at Shanghai. ’Sides, we can’t chuck a fly." The Carpenter was summoned to the conclave, and the result of his labours was a formidable spar, resembling more closely a hop-pole than a salmon-rod, some fourteen feet in length. "Why not take the lower boom and have done with it?" inquired the Young Doctor, who had abandoned ’Bradshaw’ in favour of his gun-case, and was dabbling with awful joy in oil and cotton-waste.