"Then come along," answered the man who was so universally believed to be a great British patriot; and, turning the handle of the door on the right-hand side of the living-room, he entered a small, close-smelling bedroom, furnished cheaply, as the bedroom of a small struggling fisherman would be. The Smalls were honest, homely folk, the domestic department being carried on by Tom's younger daughter, Mary, who at the moment happened to be visiting her married sister in Louth. The son, Ted, having lit a petrol table-lamp--one of those which, filled with spirit, give forth gas from the porous block by which the petrol is absorbed and an intense light in consequence--Lewin Rodwell went to the corner of the room where an old curtain of crimson damask hung before a recess. This he drew aside, when, hanging in the recess, were shown several coats and pairs of trousers--the wardrobe of old Tom Small; while below was a tailor's sewing-machine on a treadle stand--a machine protected by the usual wooden cover. The latter he lifted; but beneath, instead of a machine for the innocent needle-and-cotton industry, there was revealed a long electrical tapping-key upon an ebonite base, together with several electrical contrivances which, to the uninitiated, would present a mysterious problem. A small, neatly-constructed Morse printing machine, with its narrow ribbon of green paper passing through beneath a little glass cover protecting the "inker" from the dust; a cylindrical brass relay with its glass cover, and a tangle of rubber-insulated wires had been hidden beneath that square wooden cover, measuring two and a half feet by one. Behind the sewing-machine stand, and cunningly concealed, there ran a thick cable fully two inches in diameter, which was nothing else but the shore-end of a submarine cable directly connecting the East Coast of England with Wangeroog, the most northerly of the East Frisian Islands, running thence across to Cuxhaven, at the mouth of the Elbe, and on by the land-line, via Hamburg, to Berlin. The history of that cable was unknown and unsuspected by the British public, who, full of trust of the authorities, never dreamed that there could possibly be any communication from the English shore actually direct into Berlin. Five years before the declaration of war the German Government had approached the General Post Office, offering to lay down a new cable from Wangeroog to Spurn Head, in order to relieve some of the constantly increasing traffic over the existing cables from Lowestoft, Bacton and Mundesley. Long negotiations ensued, with the result that one day the German cable-ship _Christoph_ passed the Chequer shoal and, arriving off the Spurn Lighthouse, put in the shore-end, landed several German engineers to conduct the electrical control-tests between ship and shore, and then sailed away back to Germany, paying out the cable as she went.