Melton, A.B., whistling over and over the opening bars of the chorus of "Do You Want Us to Lose the War?" started his metallically clanking jig again, but presently, like a man with something on his mind, sidled over and shoved his Balaklava-bordered face against the outside of the closely-reefed hood of my "lammy" coat, and muttered thickly something about being afraid he had got himself into trouble. When I had pulled loose a snap and improved communications by unmuffling a lee ear, I learned that it had just occurred to the good chap that he failed to report to the bridge the battleship he had sighted "fifty yards to the port beam," and he was wondering whether there would be a "strafe" coming from the skipper about it. "Fact is, sir," he said, speaking brokenly as the galloping gusts every now and then forced a word back into his mouth, "that that rip-rarin' stem, with the white foam flyin' off both sides of it, bearing down right for where I was standin'--all that was so like what I saw the night of Jutland in the _Firebrand_ that--that the turn it give me took my mind right back and--and I wasn't thinkin' o' anything else till the _'Lympus_ was gone by." I assured him that, since the _Olympus_ had doubtless been sighted from the bridge several winks before she had been visible from his less-favourable vantage, they would probably have been too busy to respond to his call at the voice-pipe even had he tried to report what he saw. "If I were you," I said, "I would forget all about that, and try to explain how a cruiser that the _Firebrand_ was about to ram bow-to-bow" (I had, of course, already heard something of that dare-devilish exploit) "could have looked to you like the _Olympus_ ramping down on a right-angling course and threatening to slice off the _Flyer's_ stern with all her depth-charges. I quite understood that one ramming is a good deal like another, as far as a big ship hitting a destroyer fair and square is concerned, but----" "'Twasn't that _first_ cru'ser 'tall, sir," Melton interrupted, nuzzling into my "lammy" hood again to make himself heard. "Twas 'nother 'un, sir--a wallopin' big un. The seas was stiff wi' cru'sers fer a minit, sir, an' no sooner was we clear o' the first un than the second come tearin' down on us, tryin' to cut us in two amidships. An' that last un was a battl' cru'ser nigh as big as the _'Lympus_, all shot up in the funnels and runnin' wild an' bloody-minded like a mad bull. We were pretty nigh to bein' stopped dead, an' if she hadn't been slower'n cold grease wi' her helm she'd ha' eat us right up."