There were two bunks in D----'s narrow cabin, and it was not until we had turned into these--he in the lower, I in the upper--that the mounting glow of soul and body thawed the reserve which had again threatened to grip him in the matter of where he came from, and set his tongue wagging of his life on the old home farm, and from that to a sketchy but vivid recital of things that he had done, and hoped still to do, as the skipper of a British patrol boat. It is the vision that the memory of that recital conjures up: D----, with a Balaclava helmet pulled low over his ears, gesticulating excitedly up to where I, the unblanketed portion of my anatomy shrouded to the eyes in a wool duffel-coat, leaned out over the edge of the bunk above--that I can never dwell on without laughing outright. The story of the way in which it happened that D---- came over to get into the game in the first place did not differ greatly from those I have heard from a score or more of young Americans who, partly inspired by a sense of duty and partly lured by the promise of adventure, sought service in the British Army or Navy by passing themselves off as Canadians. He had intended to enlist in the Army at first; but when he found that six months or more might elapse before he would be sent to the other side, he crossed at his own expense on the chance of avoiding the delay. At the end of a disappointing month spent in trying to enlist in some unit that had a reasonable expectation of going into active service at once, the intervention of an old college friend--an able young chemical engineer occupying a prominent post in Munitions--secured him a sub-lieutenant's commission in the R.N.V.R. Although, as he naïvely put it, the sea was no friend of his, it appears that the M.L. game had proved congenial from the outset: so much so, indeed, that something like three years of service found him with two decorations and innumerable mentions to his credit, to say nothing of the reputation of being one of the most resourceful, energetic and generally useful men in a service in which all of those qualities are taken more or less as a matter of course. He had gone in as a Canadian for fear that he might be turned down as a Yankee, and then, to use his own words: "By the time the U.S.A. began to take a hand, I had told so many darn lies about hunting and fishing and farming in Alberta and British Columbia that I concluded it would be less trouble to go on telling them than to start in denying them. The boundary between Canada and the U.S.A. is more or less of an imaginary line, anyhow, and so is that between the average Yankee and Canuck. I reckon I've made it just as hot for the Hun as the latter as I would have as the former, and that's really the only thing that counts at this stage of the game." It was this last observation, I believe, which started D---- talking of his work.