"The two or three U-boats which were sighted in the course of the next five or six weeks ducked under without firing a shot, and I was beginning to think that perhaps they had somehow got wind of my little plan and were taking no chances in playing up to it. Then, one fine clear morning, up bobs a Fritz about six thousand yards to windward, and begins going through his part of the show almost as though he was one of our own submarines with which I had been rehearsing. His firing at us was about as bad as mine at him; but he finally lobbed one over that was close enough, so I knew he couldn't tell whether it was a hit or not, and on that I touched off the fire-raft, which was soon spouting up a fine pillar of flame and smoke. To discourage his approach on the surface, I kept up a brisk firing to give him the impression that we were going to live up to British Navy traditions by going down fighting, and to convince him that it would be much safer to close under water. This came off quite according to plan, and presently I saw the loom of his conning-tower dissolve and disappear behind the spout of one of our shells, which looked to have been a very close thing. "I stood on at a speed of five or six knots, but on a course which I reckoned he would anticipate and allow for. When I figured that he was not over a mile away, I dropped a float over the stern with a time-bomb attached to it, the detonation of which in this way I had found by experiment to furnish a much more life-like imitation of an internal explosion in a ship--when heard in hydrophones, I mean--than that of a depth-charge. The periscope which was shortly poked cautiously up for a tentative 'look-see' could not, I am pretty nearly dead certain, have revealed anything to belie the impression I had laid myself out to convey--that M.L. ---- was an explosion-riven, burning, and even already, probably a sinking ship. Besides the gay gush of flames from the fire-raft, which must have appeared to be roaring amidships, lurid tongues of fire were also spouting out of the forrard and after hatches, and from several of the ports; while a thirty-degree list to starboard might well have indicated that she was about to heel over and go down. I had looked at her that way from a periscope myself, while I was studying the effect of some 'stage property' flares in comparison with ordinary gasoline 'blow-torches,' and knew how much she looked like the real thing even when you knew she wasn't. The list? Oh, that was a very simple matter. This class of M.L.s is never on an even keel for long, anyhow, and the installation of a couple of tanks made it possible to pump water back and forth and give her any heel we wanted. We put her almost on her beam ends when we were experimenting on the thing, and without upsetting things much outside of the galley, which we had neglected to warn of what devilry was afoot.