It was at about this juncture that a change of course brought seas which had been quartering a couple of points forward of the beam, and in a jiffy the swift spurts of brine had searched out the last dry corner of the deck and sent scurrying to shelter every man who had not a watch to stand. Three times I was completely drenched in groping forward from the after-superstructure to the ward-room, under the bridge, so that I was a good deal inclined to take it as a joke--and a rather ill-timed one at that--when an ensign about to turn in on one of the transoms muttered something about being thankful that we were going to have _one_ quiet night when a man could snatch a wink of sleep. I asked him if he referred to the night we expected to be in port waiting for the _Lymptania_, but the fact that he had already dozed off proved that he really had not been trying to be funny at my expense. Indeed, it was a fairly quiet night, as nights go in destroyers; but, even so, I needed a good high sideboard to keep from rolling out of the captain's bunk, and then two sofa pillows and my overcoat to keep from pulping my shoulder against the sideboard. We were still sliding easily along at the same comfortable umpteen knots in the morning, but with the breaking of the new day a subtle change had come over the spirit of the ship. It was just such a change as one might observe in a hunter as he passes from a plain, where there is little cover, to a wood where every tree and bush may hide potential quarry. And that, indeed, was precisely the way it was with us. The night before we were "on our way"; this morning we were ploughing waters where U-boats were _known_ to be operating. It was only a couple of days previously that the good old _Carpathia_ had been put down, and not many hours had passed since then but what brought word, by one or another of the almost countless ways that have been devised to trace them, of an enemy submarine working in those waters. We were ready enough the night before, ready for anything that might have turned up; but this morning we were more than that. There was a new tenseness now, and a feeling in the air like that which follows the click-click after a trigger is set to "hair." It was as though everyone, everything, even the good little _Zip_ herself, was crouched for a spring.