"How do things look to you after a year of real war?" I asked a tall youth in blue jeans and a grey armless sweater whom I found tinkering with the sights of the forecastle gun of the destroyer in which I chanced to be out with for a few days at the time. The question was merely an ingratiating attempt to get acquainted on my part, and was ventured with no expectation of drawing a serious answer. I was not as familiar then as I have become since with the material they are making the young Yankee sailor of, however. He turned on me a keen eye, with wrinkles at the corners which I was quite right in surmising had come there through gazing at heat-waves dancing along broad horizons long before he had squinted down the sight of a naval gun. My diagnosis of "Texas cowboy" only missed the truth by the difference between that and an "Oklahoma oil driller, with a 'Varsity education and a ranch of his own." He leaned back easily with an arm over the gun-breech (where a British bluejacket under similar circumstances would have stiffened at once to attention), and yet there was nothing familiar or disrespectful in his attitude. "It looks to me like two or three things," he said after a moment of wrinkling his tanned brow as he collected his thoughts. "It looks to me as though these waters hereabouts were not going to be exactly a happy hunting-ground for the U-boat now that we're beginning to savy the game good and proper. That's one thing. Another is, that it's beginning to look as if they're waking up to the fact in the States that to call a man 'politician' is one degree worse than to call him a ---- ----. It took them a year or two of war to learn that in England, and we didn't profit much by their example. Another thing--it looks like Americans--or at least those of us as have come across to this side--are going to have a fair chance to discover that the natives of these little islands are more or less the same kind of animals the Yanks are after all. We've never had that chance in the last hundred and forty years. Instead, we've been taught from our cradles to nurse a grudge that was really wiped out when we licked them--or such forces as they could send across then--and set up business on our own account in '76. And one more thing. It looks as if Americans were at last getting off their blinkers in the matter of the Irish; that they are beginning to understand that these--but, excuse me, sir" (he turned and started adjusting the sighting mechanism again), "I just saw the Captain come up on the bridge, and I don't like to swear too freely in his hearing. And a man can't talk about this end of Ireland--or leastways about the way it's acted in the war--without swearing."