The talk washed back and forth across the hulks of classic sea mysteries, new and old; of the _City of Boston_, which went down with all hands, leaving for record only a melancholy scrawl on a bit of board to meet the wondering eyes of a fisherman on the far Cornish coast; of the _Great Queensland_, which set out with five hundred and sixty-nine souls aboard, bound by a route unknown to a tragic end; of the _Naronic_, with her silent and empty lifeboats alone left, drifting about the open sea, to hint at the story of her fate; of the _Huronian_, which, ten years later, on the same day and date, and hailing from the same port as the _Naronic_, went out into the void, leaving no trace; of Newfoundland captains who sailed, roaring with drink, under the arches of cathedral bergs, only to be prisoned, buried, and embalmed in the one icy embrace; of craft assailed by the terrible one-stroke lightning clouds of the Indian Ocean, found days after, stone blind, with their crews madly hauling at useless sheets, while the officers clawed the compass and shrieked; of burnings and piracies; of pest ships and slave ships, and ships mad for want of water; of whelming earthquake waves, and mysterious suctions, drawing irresistibly against wind and steam power upon unknown currents; of stout hulks deserted in panic although sound and seaworthy; and of others so swiftly dragged down that there was no time for any to save himself; and of a hundred other strange, stirring and pitiful ventures such as make up the inevitable peril and incorrigible romance of the ocean. In a pause Billy Edwards said musingly: "Well, there was the _Laughing Lass_." "How did you happen to hit on her?" asked Barnett quickly. "Why not, sir? It naturally came into my head. She was last seen somewhere about this part of the world, wasn't she?" After a moment's hesitation he added: "From something I heard ashore I judge we've a commission to keep a watch out for her as well as to destroy derelicts." "What about the _Laughing Lass_?" asked McGuire, the paymaster, a New Englander, who had been in the service but a short time. "Good Lord! don't you remember the _Laughing Lass_ mystery and the disappearance of Doctor Schermerhorn?" "Karl Augustus Schermerhorn, the man whose experiments to identify telepathy with the Marconi wireless waves made such a furore in the papers?" "Oh, that was only a by-product of his mind. He was an original investigator in every line of physics and chemistry, besides most of the natural sciences," said Barnett. "The government is particularly interested in him because of his contributions to aërial photography." "And he was lost with the _Laughing Lass_?"