We had concluded lunch--a meal that commenced with iced grape-fruit (grape-fruit in Ultima Thule, harkee!)--when the captain beckoned me to accompany him on another tour. It was of a more official nature this time, and included a routine inspection of the storerooms and magazines, and I joined the little group of officers who hurried in the wake of that tall, striding figure with gold lace round the peak of his cap, who knew his ship as I know the inside of my pocket. We were a band of strenuous adventurers in search of the unfindable. Never did red-shirted miners ply pick and shovel in the first days of the Klondyke rush as that captain laboured through the long afternoon in search of Dust. Up and down the shafts leading to speckless storerooms, hand over hand by burnished steel rungs into the uttermost bowels of the ship we went; and as we passed, the captain’s hand was for ever going out to run along a transverse frame or search the interior of a cofferdam in the same fruitless quest. Perspiration ran down our faces, but the break-neck pace never slackened. “Light!” barked the captain, and the breathless first lieutenant obediently flashed an electric torch into some crannyhole.... The hunt checked while the captain craned and peered, and then moved on. The first lieutenant’s sigh of relief was always audible above the ring of our footsteps. Once as the procession sped along some labyrinth among the shell-rooms the captain’s finger shot out accusingly to indicate a junction-box on the white enamelled bulkhead (an infinitesimal detail in the vast complexity of a battleship). It was an affair of brass secured by small screws, but one of the screws was missing. “Spoke about that last week,” rapped out the captain, already a dozen yards ahead. The first lieutenant looked at the junction-box as we hurried on, and wiped his face. “Gee!” he said. Then he eyed me with mingled desperation and pride. “_Some_ captain,” he said. I dropped out of the running about four o’clock because we were in the neighbourhood of the gunroom (steerage, they called it) where I had been invited to tea. I took with me an uneasy recollection of the first lieutenant’s reproachful eyes as I sheered out of the procession, but it was speedily obliterated by the interest and charm of the ensuing hour. The American midshipman is the senior of his British “opposite number” by perhaps a couple of years--but there the difference begins and ends. The half-shy warmth of my welcome; the rather oppressive decorum of the assembly as we took our places round the tea-table, were not otherwise than it would have been in a British gunroom under similar conditions; the quick thaw that synchronised with the rapid disappearance of buttered toast and jam was Youth asserting itself over International Courtesies.