"It was rather a problem, calculating how to get every one off in two small boats, one of which had a hole in the bottom. The whaler would still float right side up, however, and we finally managed it by putting the badly wounded, with a pulling crew, in the _Sydney's_ cutter, which was sent to aid us in the morning, and the rest piling into the whaler and sitting in the water. Then a long tow-line was passed to the cutter (long enough to let her get out beyond the breakers before a strain came on it) and she pulled away with the whole procession. ----, in spite of all I could do to induce him to get into the whaler, insisted on swimming out through the breakers and boarding her outside. If he hadn't been starving and thirsting for forty-eight hours I would have put it down as pure swank; as it was, however, I can't believe he was actuated by anything else than a wish to ease off the load on the damaged boat while it was going through the breakers. He was a thoroughly good sport, that ----, and, as I told you, I was a good deal puzzled to account for it until I learned about his being half English. "We reached the _Sydney_ all right, and the whaler was just being hoisted in when I heard the Captain's voice from the bridge asking where Lieutenant X---- was. I looked up just in time to catch him staring down at me with open-eyed amazement. 'Oh, there he is!' he exclaimed, turning away with a grin on his face. That led me, for the first time in twenty-four hours, to take a look at what I could see of myself without a glass. It was my turn to grin--and to blush. Absolutely the sum total of my wardrobe was my shirt and a seaman's straw hat! Nothing else. To ease my feet from boots after standing on the scorching iron decks of the _Emden_, I had shifted to an old pair of dancing pumps when I returned to the _Sydney_ and these, in the rush of departure, I had worn ashore. These, and my socks, must have been scoured off among the coral clinkers, and my cap probably went when we stumbled into the sea-birds' roost in the darkness. But where I lost my trousers, and what sailor gave me his hat, I have never been able to make out." I asked Lieutenant X---- if it was true, as I had heard, that the officers of the victor and vanquished took advantage of the several days they spent together in the _Sydney_ before the Germans were disembarked at Colombo to foregather and talk the battle over.