But after all that could be prepared for has been done, there always remains some awkward possibility which the wit of man can never foresee. Take the incident of the Q-ship _Ravenstone_, which was commissioned as a Q-ship on June 26, 1917, under the name of _Donlevon_. A month later she was torpedoed one afternoon in the Atlantic, 40 miles south of the Fastnet. Fortunately there were no casualties, and fortunately, too, the ship did not straight away founder. There was a heavy sea running, and she was soon down by the head; but she was also prevented from using her engines, for the torpedo had struck her in No. 2 hold, and the force of the explosion had lifted and thrown overboard from the fore well-deck a 7-inch hemp hawser. This had fallen into the sea, floated aft, and there fouled the propeller so effectually that the ship could go neither ahead nor astern. It was a most annoying predicament, but who could have foreseen it? The submarine apparently ‘hopped it,’ for she made no further attack, and one of Admiral Bayly’s sloops, H.M.S. _Camelia_, stood by _Donlevon_, and from Berehaven arrived the tug _Flying Spray_, who got her in tow. Another sloop, the _Myosotis_, had her in tow for thirty-one hours, handling her so well in the heavy sea that, in spite of _Donlevon_ being down by the head and steering like a mad thing, she safely arrived in Queenstown, and was afterwards paid out of the Service. Ten thousand pounds’ worth of damage had been done. In the early summer of 1917, at a time when the United States Navy had just begun to help us with their destroyers and the enemy was hoping very shortly to bring us ‘to our knees,’ we had thirteen different Q-ships based on Queenstown. There was the converted sloop _Aubrietia_, commanded by Admiral Marx, M.V.O., D.S.O., who, in spite of his years, had come back to the Service and accepted a commission as captain R.N.R. For a time he was in command of H.M. armed yacht _Beryl_, owned by Lord Inverclyde. From this command he transferred to the more exciting work of decoying submarines, and it is amusing when one thinks of an admiral pretending to be the skipper of a little tramp. Of this thirteen there was Captain Grenfell’s _Penshurst_, about which the reader has already been informed. Captain Gordon Campbell was in _Pargust_, and Commander Leopold A. Bernays, C.M.G., was in _Vala_. The latter was one of the most unusual personalities in a unique service. Before the war he had left the Navy and gone to Canada, where he had some pretty tough adventures. On the outbreak of war he joined up, and crossed to England as a soldier, but managed to get transferred quite early to a mine-sweeping trawler, where he did magnificent work month after month; first in sweeping up the mine-field laid off Scarborough at the time of the German raid, December, 1914, and afterwards in clearing up the difficult Tory Island minefield, which had been laid by