Jock would have made an ideal platoon commander: Angus would have shone as a skipper of an M.L.; but since from time immemorial the powers-that-be who run the Admiralty and War Office delight in putting square pegs in round holes, Jock McIntosh was manfully sticking to a job that was obviously uncongenial, while his brother was doing likewise; and each envied the other. Meredith, on the other hand, was literally "made for the job." Slightly above middle height, broad and square-shouldered, heavy-browed and with a firm and somewhat prominent jaw, Kenneth looked and was a sailor-man, every inch of him. At the age of twelve he could handle a sailing dinghy with a skill that was the envy and admiration of many so-called yachtsmen, who would be hopelessly at sea in a double sense without the assistance of their paid hands. Between the ages of twelve and fifteen he spent every available holiday afloat in his father's ten-ton yacht, until he knew intimately the art of fore and aft sailing, and incidentally gained first-hand information of practically every harbour and creek on the south coast of England. Then came the outbreak of the Great War. Promptly the _Ripple_, Mr. Meredith's cutter, was laid up, while her owner, exchanging a yachting suit for a khaki uniform, went to India as second-in-command of a Territorial battalion. Kenneth went back to school, bitterly bewailing the fact that he had not been born three years earlier. Fellows from the senior form--in many cases physically inferior to him--donned khaki and disappeared into the mists of Flanders. At intervals some turned up at the old school, bronzed, aged and ballasted with a more than nodding acquaintance with life and death: others never returned--their names figured prominently in the School Roll of Honour as fingerposts to the path of Higher Duty. At length Meredith's chance came. He had to admit that it was influence that did the trick. A certain retired Admiral whose name Kenneth had never heard, but who knew Mr. Meredith years ago, worked the oracle, and the lad found himself a full-fledged sub-lieutenant of the R.N.V.R. The only fly in the ointment was the fact that Meredith had been appointed to a northern M.L. flotilla, where, in strange and remote waters, there appeared to be little chance of seeing the "actual thing." He had hoped to be appointed to the Dover Patrol, where his intimate knowledge of the Channel would be a decided asset and where the prospects of smelling powder would be almost certain to materialise.