D---- lay quiet for a minute, the wrinkles of a baleful grin of reminiscence showing on both sides of the aperture of the Balaclava. "The first chance we had to try the thing out it nearly did us in," he chuckled presently. "No, Fritz had nothing to do with it. _He_, luckily for us, submerged and beat it off after firing three or four shots--probably through mistaking the smoke of a couple of trawlers just under the horizon for that of destroyers. It was all due to bad luck and bad judgment--principally the latter, I'm afraid. It was bad luck to the extent that the U-boat was sighted down to leeward, so that there was no alternative but to put over my 'fire-raft' on the windward side. The bad judgment came in through my underestimating the force of the wind and the fierceness with which the kerosene would burn when fanned by it. Scarcely had it been touched off before there was a veritable _Flammen-werfer_ playing against thirty or forty feet of the windward side, and in a way which made it impossible for a man to venture there to cast off the wire cables which moored the raft. As this class of M.L.s have wooden hulls, you will readily see that this was no joke. "The splash of the beam seas proved an efficacious antidote, so far as the hull was concerned, however; but how some other highly inflammable material I was carrying 'midships escaped being fired in the minute or more that I was swinging her through sixteen points to bring the raft to the leeward of her---- Well, I can only chalk that up to the credit of the special Providence that is supposed to intervene especially to save drunks and fools. You can bet your life I never let myself be tempted into making that break again, though it involved a trying exercise of self-restraint when it chanced that the very next Fritz I sighted also bore down the wind.