"Poor G---- had lost a good deal more than his steering gear it soon transpired, for the fire which had consumed his bridge had also gutted his cabin, and reduced everything in it to cinders except an old Norfolk jacket. How _that_ escaped we never could figure out, for of garments hanging on pegs to the left and right of it no trace was left. As G---- was of about three times the girth of any other British officer in those waters at the time, the wardrobe we tried to get together for him was a grotesque combination; indeed, so far as I recall now, the old Norfolk had to serve him as everything from pyjamas and bath-robe to dinner-jacket and great-coat during that trying period. It was a weird figure he cut presiding at those Gargantuan feasts he spread for us on the bruised and battered old _Carmania_, but there wasn't a one of us who wouldn't have changed places with him--Norfolk and all--for the assurance of half his luck. Such is the monotony of this patrol work in the outer seas, that, after your first enthusiasm wears off, you get into a state of mind in which you can never conceive that anything is ever going to happen. That we had the one most decisive naval battle of the war just ahead of us, no one dreamed at this time. "The fight between the _Carmania_ and _Cap Trafalgar_," he continued, "has well been called 'The Battle of the Haystacks,' for never before (or since, for that matter) have two ships with such towering upper works stood off and tried to batter each other to pieces with gunfire. Indeed, I well recall G----'s saying that, up to the very end, he could not conceive that either ship could sink the other, and of how--even after the _Carmania_ had been struck three or four-score times and a raging fire forward had driven him from the bridge--he kept wondering in the back of his brain what sort of a fight the duel would resolve itself into when both had exhausted their shells. Luckily, he did not have to face that problem. "Both ships, according to G----'s account, began blazing at each other as soon as they came in range, and, as each was eager to fight it out to a finish, the distance separating them was, for a while, reduced as rapidly as possible. At something like three thousand yards, however, some sort of a rapid-fire gun burst into action on the _Trafalgar_. 'It didn't appear to be doing me much harm,' said G---- in telling of it, 'but the incessant "pom-pom" of the accursed thing got so much on my nerves that I drew off far enough to dull the edge of its infernal yapping.'