“It’s a tune Phoebe was playing on the piano a good deal the last time we were home,” said Whistler with some gravity. “Wish I’d hear from the folks again. I am worried about Phoebe.” He spoke of his eldest sister, who during the last few months had not been well. Although, like many brothers and sisters, Philip Morgan, by his chums usually called Whistler, and Phoebe had their differences, now when far from home, “the folks” seem nearer and dearer than ever in his mind. Philip Morgan lay with his chums on a bank beside a tiny trickle of water called a brook in that shire, although it was nothing more than a rill. They were high up on “the downs,” overlooking a port in which the American destroyer _Colodia_ lay at anchor amid a multitude of naval vessels of three nations. Over the sea a thick haze, on land the yellow sunshine, so welcome when it is seen in England that it seems more beautiful than elsewhere. The boys had forty-three hours’ shore leave, and for that brief space of time they desired, as most sailors do, to get just as far away in spirit and in surroundings from the ship as possible. They had tramped into the country the day before, spent the night in four wonderful beds in an old inn that might have harbored some of Sir Francis Drake’s men at the time of the Armada, and were now due at the wharf in a few hours. Life aboard a destroyer or an American submarine chaser in foreign service is not very pleasant if it is exciting. The space for sleeping, for instance, on these fast vessels is scarcely greater than that assigned to the crews of submarines. As Ikey Rosenmeyer, who possessed a riotous imagination, had said at the inn: “Oi, oi! sleeping in a real bed again is better than bein’ at home in Ireland, and Frenchy says that’s heaven ’cause his mother came from there. Why, it is better’n heaven! You could spread out your legs and wiggle all your toes without havin’ the master-at-arms down on you like a thousand of brick.” Frenchy, in a dreamy and poetic mood, not infrequent when the romantic Irish blood in his veins was stirred, was gazing off over the sea at the fogbank. “Think of it,” he murmured, “How many hundred an’ thousan’ of ships have sailed out of this harbor into just such a fogbank as that--” “And never came back,” interrupted Torry. “Some tough old gobs, the ancient British seamen, boy.” “‘Tough’ is right,” chuckled Frenchy, his poetic feelings exploded. “And they haven’t got over it yet. They’ve got old-timers in the British Navy now that can remember when the cat was used on the men’s backs, reg’lar.” “And every British sailor had tar on his breeches--that’s why they used to call ’em ‘brave British tars,’” scoffed Torry. “Can it! These English chaps are all right. They aren’t much different from us garbies.” “Is _that_ so?” exclaimed Ikey, whose sharp eyes allowed little to escape them. “What kind of a deep-sea crab do you call this comin’ down the road right now, I want to know?”