President Wilson took no perfunctory interest in the Navy. In fact, he had the keenest naval instinct. People, you know, are born with a passion for some one thing, or in their youth it comes to them. When Thomas Woodrow Wilson was a boy--(he had not then dropped the Thomas)--he picked out for himself a naval career. What a jolly good captain he would have made of the "_Virginia_" or the "_New Jersey_!" Living as a boy on a river, he loved boating next to books, or even before books. He had a penchant for sailing and loved sea stories, and his ambition was to follow Jones and Farragut. When the opportunity was within reach to go to the Naval Academy at Annapolis, his father, a scholarly Presbyterian preacher of the old school, who knew his son's real mission in life better than Thomas Woodrow, said, in substance, "No; you are not meant for the sea; letters, literature, books, statesmanship for you." I do not know whether the future President accepted the parental dictum with the nautically cheerful "Aye, aye, sir," but he accepted it, and the Navy lost an officer who would probably have destroyed many precedents and won many victories, when the father snatched him from the topsail and sent him down below to the drudgery of learning languages and political economy. I do not know a civilian who employs more naval terms. The call to the sea is in his blood. His father kept him out of the Navy, but he could not keep the Navy out of him, or the Navy lore and lingo, any more than you can keep the Quaker out of a Quaker by turning him out of meeting. At sea President Wilson loved to wear whites or blues, as near regulation as a civilian can, to don a cap, to watch the heaving of the lead and the weighing of the anchor, and listen to the "shiver-my-timbers" talk that one overhears from the older sailors on duty. CHAPTER XIV COMRADES OF THE MIST U. S. BATTLESHIPS WITH BRITISH GRAND FLEET--DREADNAUGHTS UNDER RODMAN FORMED SIXTH BATTLE SQUADRON--ASSIGNED POST OF HONOR--ATTACKED SIX TIMES BY SUBMARINES--U-BOAT RAMMED THE "NEW YORK," CAUGHT IN ITS PROPELLER-- THREE BATTLESHIPS, UNDER RODGERS, AT BANTRY BAY--SURRENDER OF GERMAN FLEET. There was a thrill through all the Grand Fleet, a storm of cheers sweeping from Admiral Beatty's flagship down to the last destroyer that December morning when the United States dreadnaughts, under Admiral Hugh Rodman, steamed around the headlands, up the curved channel, and down the long line of British battleships, dropping anchor among them. Twelve days at sea, weathering a gale that raged for three days, they had had a hard voyage. Nearing the coast in the pitch-black darkness of a starless night, they had, a few hours before, been met by a division of destroyers which escorted them to port. The sun, which rises late in that northern clime, broke through the mist as they reached the entrance to the harbor. Seaplanes circled the vessels, and a kite balloon's heliograph flashed its welcome.