The First Lieutenant had just come down from the upper-deck, and stood warming his hands by the fire. Big-boned, blue-eyed, health and vitality seemed to radiate from his kindly, forceful personality. Of all the officers on board "Jimmy the One" was, with perhaps the exception of the Captain, most beloved by the men. A seaman to the fingertips, slow to wrath and clean of speech, he had the knack of getting the last ounce out of tired men without driving or raising his voice. Working cables on the forecastle in the cold and snowy darkness, when men's faculties grow torpid with cold, and their safety among the grinding cables depends more upon the alert supervision of the First Lieutenant than the mere instinct for self-preservation, "Jimmy the One" was credited with powers allied to those of the high Gods. "'Tween decks," where the comfort and cleanliness of close on eleven hundred men was mainly his affair, they abused, loved and feared him with whole-hearted affection. His large football-damaged nose smelt out dirt as a Zulu witch-doctor smells out magic. The majority of the vast ship's company--seamen ratings, at all events--he knew by name. He also presided over certain of the lower-deck amusements, and, at the bi-weekly cinema shows, studied their tastes in the matter of Charlie Chaplin and the Wild West with the discrimination of a lover choosing flowers for his mistress. His own personal amusements were few. He admitted possessing three books which he read and re-read in rotation: "Peter Simple," "Alice in Wonderland," and a more recent discovery, Owen Wister's "Virginian." A widowed mother in a Yorkshire dower house was the only relative he was ever heard to refer to, and for her benefit every Sunday afternoon he sat down for an hour, as he had since schooldays, and wrote a boyish, detailed chronicle of his doings during the past week. The two watch-keeping Lieutenants sat one on each arm of the deep-seated chesterfield opposite the fire. They were the Inseparables of the Mess, knit together in that curious blend of antagonistic and sympathetic traits of character which binds young men in an austere affection passing the love of woman. One was short and stout, the other tall and lean; an illustration in the First Lieutenant's edition of "Alice in Wonderland" supplied them with their nicknames, which they accepted from the first without criticism or demur.