allowing himself to be bowled over now by an amateur sailor from London, who, if he came to Kiel, would only come armed with a fresh bait designed to rob the Fatherland of its "future upon the water." Until a bare two weeks before the date of the arrival of the British Squadron in German waters, nothing was publicly known either in London or Berlin of the projected trip of Mr. Churchill to Kiel. Von Tirpitz thereupon had resort to the weapon he wields almost as dexterously as the submarine--publicity--to depopularize the scheme of the misguided friends of Anglo-German peace. It was not the first time, of course, that the Grand-Admiral had deliberately crossed the avowed policy of the German Foreign Office. Von Tirpitz now caused the Churchill-Kiel enterprise to be "exposed" in the press, in the confident hope that premature announcement would effectually kill the entire plan. It did. Tirpitz diplomacy scored again, as it was wont to do. Whereof I speak in this highly pertinent connection I know, on the authority of one of von Tirpitz’s most subtle and trusted henchmen. To the latter’s eyes, I hope, these reminiscences may some day come. He, at least, will know that history, not fiction, is recited here. CHAPTER II THE FIRST ACT "I am simply in my element here!" exclaimed the Kaiser ecstatically to Vice-Admiral Sir George Warrender, as the twain stood surveying the glittering array of steel-blue German and British men-of-war facing one another amicably on the unruffled bosom of Kiel harbor at high noon of June 25. From my perch of vantage abaft the forward thirteen-and-one-half-inch guns of His Britannic Majesty’s superdreadnought battleship _King George V_, whither the quartette of London correspondents had been banished during William II’s sojourn in the flagship, I could "see" him talking on the quarter-deck below, speaking with those nervous, jerky right-arm gestures which are as important a part of his staccato conversation as uttered words.