But when the talk drifted, as it always does in the end, to baseball and baseballers, I knew that there was going to be an opening for me presently, and stood by to take advantage of it. A three-year absentee from the bleachers, I was not sufficiently up on last season's pennant race "dope" to do more than make frequent sapient observations on this or that big-leaguer's stickwork or fielding as he was mentioned; but when they began to discuss, or rather to wrangle over, for discuss is far too polite a term, the theory of the game and to grow red in the face over such esoterics (or "inside stuff," to put it in "Fanese") as how and when a "squeeze" ought to be pulled off, I showed them the bulbous first joint of the little finger of my right hand--which there is no other way of acquiring than by the repeated telescopings of many seasons on the diamond--and was welcomed at last on equal terms. A seat was offered me on a depth-charge, across the business end of which an empty sack had been thrown to prevent a repetition of what came near happening the time a stoker, who was proving that Hans Wagner could never again be a popular idol now that we were at war with the Huns, punctuated his argument by hammering with a monkey-wrench on the firing mechanism. They were not as impressed as they should have been when I told them that I learned the game under the tutelage of the mighty Bill Lange (this, of course, because the incomparable "Big Bill" was at his zenith long before their time); but they were duly respectful when I said I had played three years' Varsity baseball, and became quite deferential when I assured them I had also survived a season of bush-league in the North-West. There was some kind of electrician rating in the crowd who had been a bush-league twirler before his "wing went glass," as he put it, and he, it soon transpired, had played in one place or another with a number of my old team mates of the Montana League. Deep in reminiscence of those good old days, I quite forgot my subtle scheme of using baseball as a stalking-horse for destroyer yarns, when the arrival of some callers from a British sloop lying a mile or two farther down the harbour recalled it to me. They had been in the _Moonflower_, the man next me said, when she put a U-boat out of business not long before, and one of them--he had some sort of decoration for his part in the show--spun a cracking good yarn about it if you got him started. This latter I managed to do by asking him how it chanced that the _Moonflower_ was allowed to sport a star on her funnel. The story he told, the while he rolled cigarettes and worked his jaws on Yankee chewing-gum, revealed rather too much that may be used in some future surprise party to make it possible to publish just yet, but it had the desired effect of turning the current of reminiscence U-boatward. That was what I wanted, for, now that men from several other destroyers had