I thanked Melton for his yarn, bade him good night, and was about to start picking my way to my cabin to turn in, when I sensed rather than saw that there was something further he wanted to say, perhaps some final tribute to his officers and mates of the _Firebrand_, I thought. There was a shuffling of sea-booted feet on the steel deck, a nervous pulling off and on of woollen mittens, and it was out. "I just wanted to say, sir," he said, "that I likes the Yankee Jackies very much; 'specially their candy an' chewin' gum. I was just wonderin' if that last stick you give me was all----" I emptied both pockets before I renewed my thanks to Melton and bade him a final good night. There are strange ingredients entering into the composition of the cement that is binding Britain and America together, and if there is any objection to chewing gum it certainly cannot be on the ground that it lacks adhesiveness. CHAPTER III "BACK FROM THE JAWS" I had gone to the _Nairobi_, not because the rather routine stunt her flotilla was on promised any excitement, but rather because of the notable part she had played in the Jutland action and the fact that I had been assured that there was still in her an officer who was said to have figured prominently in the splendid account she had given of herself on that occasion. As luck would have it, however, this officer had been appointed to another destroyer only a day or two previously, so that no veteran of the great action remained in the ward room. A canvass of the ship's company revealed that one of the stoker petty officers was a Jutland survivor, but before I could run him to cover some kind of a light cruiser affair had occurred down Heligoland Bight way which called for destroyer work in that direction, and the next two days, with the flotilla creasing up the brine at high speed and everyone at Action Stations most of the time, were not favourable for the "intimate reminiscence" I was bent on drawing out.