Sea-booted, mufflered and goggled, and ponderous where his half-inflated "Gieve" bulged beneath his ample duffle-coat, he leaned over the starboard rail of the bridge for a space to get the clear view ahead that the frost-layer on the wind-screen denied him from anywhere inboard. Then, just ducking a sea that rolled in tumultuously fluent ebony over the forecastle gun and smothered the bridge in flying spray, he nipped across and threw a half-Nelson around a convenient stanchion before the pitch, as she dived down the back of the retreating wave, threw him against the port rail. "Got 'em all in line again," he said, pushing his face close to mine. "That's something to be thankful for, anyhow. Didn't expect to round up half of 'em before we had to stand away to pick up the southbound. Piece of uncommon good luck. Now we can stand easy for a spell." I was about to observe that "stand easy" didn't seem to me quite the appropriate term to apply to the act of keeping one's balance on a craft which was blending thirty-degree rolls with forty-degree pitches to form a corkscrew-like motion of an eccentricity comparable to nothing else in the gamut of human experience, when he continued with: "Not much like what I was enjoying a month ago, this," indicating the encompassing darkness with a rotary roll of his head. "I was in a destroyer at an Italian base then--Brindisi--with the smell of dust and donkeys and wine-shops in the air, and straight-backed, black-haired, black-eyed girls, with rings in their ears and baskets of fruit--soft red and yellow and blue fruit--on their heads. Now it's"--and she put her nose deep into a wave that dealt her a sledge-hammer blow and sent spray flying half-way to the foretop in a solid stream--"this, just this. Grey by day, black by night, and slap-bang all the time. No light, no colour, no atmosphere, no----" "I quite understand," I cut in. "No straight-backed girls with rings in their ears and fruit-baskets on their heads. Of course, there's more light and colour down there than here; but wasn't there also a bit of slap-bang to it now and then?" "Ay, there was a bit," he replied. "There was the time----" He started to tell me the already time-worn yarn of the Yarmouth trawler skipper and the Grimsby trawler skipper, each of whom, enamoured of the same Taranto maid, wooed her while the other was absent on patrol; of how one of them, looking through his glass as he stood in toward the entrance on one of his return trips, saw his rival walking on the beach with arm round the waist of the artful minx in question, and her red-and-yellow kerchief-bound head resting on his shoulder; of how the one on the trawler, consumed by a jealousy fairly Latin in its intensity, swung round his six-pounder, discharged it at the faithless pair, and--so crookedly did the rage-blind eyes see through the sights--hit a fisherman's hut half a mile away from his target!