The men of the American battleships of the Grand Fleet--always on guard at its isolated base, and able to grant scant and infrequent leave to any one serving in it--have had less chance to see the country and its people than have their mates of the destroyers and submarines, whose bases have been more convenient to England and with chances of leave turning up rather oftener. Their main, almost their only, point of contact, therefore, has been the British bluejacket. Everything considered, perhaps there could not have been a better one. No finer, and yet more fairly characteristic, cross-section of the British people could be revealed than that shown by the personnel of the Royal Navy, from stoker or seaman to Commander-in-Chief. There is no class by which the Briton himself should be prouder to be judged. I have already written of the mixed feelings of curiosity and interest with which the British bluejackets awaited their first intimate meeting with the Yanks. It was no whit different on the part of the latter. With the Northern Base swept by its more or less unending succession of winter storms, there was not much chance for personal contact in the first few months after the Americans came over, and before better weather and lengthening spring days gave opportunity for inter-fleet visits and foregatherings ashore the men of both Navies had had a good many chances to see each other handling their ships. From that alone a deep mutual respect was born, and it was on that solid foundation that the present astonishingly friendly relations between the men of the two allied Navies is based. The British, with four years of war experience behind them, were doing things with their ships, quite in the ordinary course of the day's work, that the Americans had never reckoned on attempting save in emergency. The shooting and the general efficiency of the British ships under the arduous North Sea winter conditions deepened and broadened the respect and admiration of the Americans the more they saw of it, and the more they discovered the extent to which they would have to exert and outdo themselves to equal it. The feeling of the American bluejacket on this score was concisely but comprehensively expressed by an old Yankee man-of-war's-man--one of the few real veterans I have encountered on this side--with whom I had a yarn not long after the arrival of U.S.S. _New York_.