The cabin which I had been occupying in harbour was one located immediately under the conning-tower, and used by the navigating officer when the ship was at sea, the arrangement being that I was to go aft and live in his regular cabin while we were outside. Going forward, after tea, I threw together a few things for my servant to carry back to my temporary quarters. Groping aft in Stygian blackness along the windward side of the ship, I encountered spray in clouds driving across even the lofty fo'c'sle deck. The wind appeared to have shaken off its flukiness as we cleared the headlands, and, blowing with a swinging kick behind it, was rolling up a sea to match. I did not need to be told by the sea-booted sailor whom I bumped on a ladder that it wasn't "goin' t' be no nite fer lam's," to know that there was something lively in the weather line in pickle, probably to be uncorked before morning. The grate, robbed of its chimney, was cold and empty when I went in for seven o'clock dinner--half an hour earlier than in harbour--and there was just the suggestion of chill in the close air of the wardroom. An engineer-lieutenant who started to reminisce about a winter cruise he had once made in the Arctic was peremptorily hushed up with a request to "talk about something warmer." A yarn about chasing the _Königsberg_ in the lagoons of East Africa was more kindly received, and an R.N.R.'s account of how his ship carried Moslem pilgrims from Singapore to Jeddah on their way to Mecca brought a genial glow of warmth with it. There was something strangely cheering in his story of how, when there was a following simoon blowing across the brassy surface of the Red Sea, the Lascar stokers used to go mad with the heat and jump overboard in their delirium. The air seemed less dank and chill after that recital. I ventured a "sudorific" contribution by telling of the way they made "desert storms" in the California movies with the aid of buckets of sand and a "wind machine." The whole table showed interest in this--probably because it was so far removed from "shop"--and sat long over port and coffee planning a "blower" that would discharge both wind and sand--in sufficient quantities to give the "desert storm" illusion over the restricted angle of the movie lens--at the turning of a single crank. One does not need to be long upon a British battleship to find out that the inventive genius of the Anglo-Saxon race is not all confined to the American branch.