We were just passing the riven wreck of a large freighter as I sidled inconsequently along to the forecastle, and the strange way in which the stern appeared to be stirring to the barely perceptible swell gave ample excuse for turning to the crew of the foremost gun for a possible explanation. It was Leading Seaman Gains, as incisive of speech as he was quick of movement, who replied, and I recognized him at once as a youth of force and personality, one of the type to whom the broadened opportunities for quick promotion offered the Lower Deck through the war has given a new outlook on life. "She was a tramp with a cargo of American mules for the Serbs, sir," he said, "and she was submarined two or three miles off shore. The mouldie cracked her up amidships, but her back didn't break till she grounded on that sand spit there. At first her stern sank till her poop was awash at high tide--there's only a few feet rise and fall here, as you probably know, sir--but when the bodies of the mules that had been drowned 'tween decks began to swell they blocked up all the holes and finally generated so much gas that the increased buoyancy lifted the keel of the stern half clear of the bottom and left it free to move with the seas. I have heard they intend to blow out her bottom and sink her proper for fear that end of her might float off in a storm and turn derelict." That story was, as I learned later, substantially true, but it had just enough of the fantastic in it to tempt the twinkling eyed "Number Two" to a bit of embroidery on his own account. He was the one with the muscular forearms and the slight limp. The suggestion of "New World" accent in his speech was traceable, he subsequently told me, to the many years he had spent on the Esquimault station in British Columbia. "They do say, sir," he said solemnly, rubbing hard at an imaginary patch of inferior refulgency on the shining breech of his gun, "that she's that light and jumpy with mule-gas, after the sun's been beating on her poop all day, that she lifts right up in the air and tugs at her moorings like a kite balloon. And there's one buzz winging round that they're going to run a pipe-line to her end and use the gas for inflating----" Gains, evidently feeling that there were limits to which the credulity of a landsman should be imposed upon, cut in coldly and crushingly with: "She's not the only old wreck 'round here that they could draw on for 'mule-gas' if there's ever need of it, my boy; and as for her rising under her own power--well, if she ever goes as far as you did under yours the night you jumped from the _Seagull_ to the _Bow_ I'll----"