"And the rest of the crew's no more 'saline' than its 'orfficers.' That's the way they say it, ain't it, Mac? Little 'Arry, the galley-slave, was a knock-about artist in the London music-halls before he 'eard the sea a-callin', and now he doesn't 'eed nothin' else, do you, Harry? And you'll hear the sea a-callin' that nice big breakfast of yours just as soon as we get outside the Heads, won't you, Harry? And then you won't 'eed nothin' else for quite a while. And so'll Mac hear the sea a-calling his breakfast, and so'll I, and so'll all the rest of us--every mother's son. It's a fine lot of Jack Tars we are, the whole bunch of us. Did I tell you that one of my quartermasters is an ex-piano-tuner, and that the other was a Salvation Army captain before he entered the Senior Service for the duration? And my Chief--that's him you hear alternating between tinkering and swearing at the engines on the other side of that bulkhead you're leaning against--owned a motor-boat of his own before the War, and appears to have divided his waking hours between racing that and his stable of motor-cars? You can tell he was a gentleman once by the fluency of his cussing. He's the only man I've met over here that could give yours truly any kind of a run in dispensing the pungent persiflage; but I had the advantage of driving mules as a kid. "But cussing, though it helps with a lot of things, doesn't make a sailor, and the Chief's no more of a Jack Tar than me or Mac or Harry. Fact is, that the only man aboard who ever made his living out of the sea before the war is a fisherman from the Hebrides; and even the glossary in the back of my Bobbie Burns won't translate his lingo. Two or three times, when the sea has been kicking up a bit, he has managed to tell us that no self-respecting God-fearing sailor would be oot in such weather. Possibly he's been right; but, as none of us are sailors, we don't feel called on to pay much attention to his ravings. Our duty is to harass any Huns that encroach on our beat; and the fact that we've had a modicum of success in that line proves you don't have to be a sailor to qualify for the job. Which don't mean, though," he concluded with a smile of sad resignation as he rose and reached for his oil-skins, "that I don't hope and pray that I'll develop the legs and stomach of a sailor before the war's over." When breakfast was eaten, forward and aft, all hands were piped on deck, and in less than ten minutes M.L. ---- was under way and threading the winding channels of a cliff-begirt Firth to the mist-masked waters of the North Sea. * * * * *