For half an hour they navigated the channels winding up the valley, and came at length to a crumbling stone quay beside the ruin of a mill. Ferns grew in the interstices of the old brickwork, and a great peace brooded over the silent wood that towered behind. They made the boat fast there; and because boats and the sea were things as yet half-unknown and wholly attractive, none of them attempted to land. Instead, with coats rolled up as pillows and their straw hats tilted over their eyes, the seven made themselves comfortable as only naval cadets could in such cramped surroundings, and from under the thwarts each one drew a paper bag and a bottle of lemonade. “Dead low water,” said Number 1 (the bow oar) presently. “We shall have a young flood against us going back; but then there’s no chance of getting stuck on the mud.” He drew a bunch of keys from his pocket and proceeded to take careful soundings round the boat, using the keys as a sinker and the lanyard as a lead-line. “Oh, shut up about your everlasting tides,” said Number 2, “and keep quiet; I want to sleep.” “They interest me,” replied Number 1 simply. “I shall be a navigator, I think.” “You’d better go in for submarines,” said Number 4, applying himself to his bottle of fizzing beverage. “Plenty of poking about mudbanks in them if it interests you. One of the first we ever had stuck in the mud one day and never came up again.” “P’raps I shall,” admitted the bow. “In fact I shouldn’t be surprised if I _did_ go in for submarining.” Number 3 was lying on his back on the thwart, his head resting on the gunwale. “They’ll never come to anything,” he said. “The submarine’s a failure.” His eyes followed the flight of a white-winged gull that circled with outstretched wings far above their heads. “No. It’s going to be in the air, when we have a war. I’m all for flying machines....” He was silent awhile meditating, then turned his head quickly. “Bombs!” he said. “Fancy being able to drop bombs all over an enemy’s country.” “You couldn’t do it,” said Number 2. “You’d go killing women and civilians. They’d never let you.” “Who?” demanded the prospective aviator, his enthusiasm rather damped. “Who’d stop me?” “International Law,” cut in the coxswain quickly. “Conventions and all that.... Why, there’d be no limit to anything if it weren’t for international law. An enemy could go off in his beastly submarine and paralyse the trade routes.” “Paralyse ’em--how?” inquired the bow man. “Just torpedoing ’em, of course, you ass.” “What, merchant ships?” The jurist nodded. “But no one could do that. I mean you’d never get a naval officer to do that, international law or no international law. That ’ud be piracy--like those fellows at Algiers. ’Member the lecture last week?” “I don’t mean _we’d_ do it,” conceded the coxswain. “But some nations might.” The idealist shook his head. “No naval officer would,” he repeated stoutly, “whatever his nationality.”