It was not until the flotilla, salt-frosted and low in fuel, was lounging along in the leisurely dalliance of half-speed on the way back to base that I cornered Stoker Petty Officer Prince in the angle between the foremost torpedo tubes and the starboard rail, and engaged him in serious discussion of the shamefulness of supplying worn-out films to the Depôt Ship kinema. The second dog watch was only half gone, but in the hour that elapsed before it was over there was no mention of Jutland, or anything else connected with the war for that matter, though the talk ran the full gamut from cabbages to kings. I mean this quite literally, for he began by telling me of what his mother had raised in her allotment at Ipswich, and was describing how, when he was on a cruise in the _Clio_ ten years before the war, he had once shaken hands with the King of Fiji, as eight bells went to call him on watch. It was a happy inspiration which prompted me to volunteer to go down and stand a part of his watch with him in the stokehold, for once on his own "dung-hill," his restraint fell away from him and he spoke easily and naturally of the things which had befallen him there and on the deck above. There is little in the small, neat compartment from which the oil fires of a modern destroyer are fed and controlled to suggest the picture which the name "stokehold" conjures up in the popular mind. There is no coal, no grime, no sweating shovellers, no clanging doors. Under ordinary conditions two leisurely moving men do all there is need of doing, and with time to spare, and there are occasions at sea, in the winter months, when the stokehold is a more comfortable refuge than the chill fireless ward room. It was my remarking upon the grateful warmth of the stokehold after the cold wet wind that was sweeping the deck, which finally turned the current of Prince's reminiscence in the direction I had been vainly endeavouring to deflect it for the last hour. "It's all comfy enough, sir, when she's loafing along at fifteen or twenty knots," he said, slipping aside a "flap" and peering in at his fires with the critical eye of a housewife surveying her oven of bread, "but just tumble in some time when, while she already plugging away at full speed, the engine-room rings up more steam. That's the time she's just one little bit of hell down here, sir, with the white sizzle of the fires turning the furnaces to a red that shows even with the lights on, and the plates underfoot getting so hot that you have to keep dancing to prevent the soles of your boots from catching fire. Why, long toward morning of the night after Jutland----"