Guess whom I met yesterday! I’ll give you a thousand guesses. Blangy! You have been asking yourself--as I have--what in the world had become of the old rascal, who had never given us a sign of life. I ran into him in the arcades and I started blackguarding him. He maintained that you and I were the loafers because we had leisure, whereas he had none. I soon saw that he hadn’t changed and was as lazy as ever about writing. As he had a free evening we took our _apéritif_ together and he invited Fourgues to join us at dinner. Blangy isn’t afraid of him any more, now that he is in command of a trawler; indeed he treats Fourgues quite as an equal. During dinner he told all his adventures and there was material enough to fill a book. For six weeks he has been in command of a half-rotten trawler as big as a piano, with a gun as heavy as a pea-shooter, which wouldn’t be capable of going after even a crippled submarine. There are not a few like that, says Blangy, especially along the coasts of Africa and Tunis. Most of the time there is something that won’t go--rudder, tiller-rope, steering-gear, condenser, pistons, or boilers; one repairs as one can. For the rest, there are storms for which the submarines don’t care a hang, but which keep the poor old trawlers in port. So you can see just what our anti-submarine service amounts to. Fortunately the papers say that in three months not one German U-boat will be left, we have sunk so many! Blangy is not of this opinion, nor Fourgues either, nor I. I can write you this, dear old bean, for I have a sort of an idea you think the same. We are not officials, we four! Blangy says I’m to send you greeting, and he laughed when I told him that on you, a navigating officer, they had played the same trick as on him, putting you behind a gun instead of on the bridge. He hopes that you will also get a trawler or anything else that will let you navigate. He is satisfied in spite of his misadventures on his rotten raft. He feels that he is living. His fever and rheumatism have left him, and he asks for nothing but the opportunity to rake a submarine, unless it’s the other way round! Having bored you enough with Blangy, I will return to the adventures of the _Pamir_ from Mudros as far as Algiers--that is to say, for the last month and a half. You may be surprised to have me write so soon and I’ll tell you why at once. We picked up at sea the crew of the cargo-boat _Mer-Morte_, of the same company as ourselves, which had been torpedoed the night before. In one of the boats was Villiers, engineer of the _Mer-Morte_, and the owner allowed Fourgues to keep him on board. That being the case, I passed half my work over to him--the engine, that is--and I have a little more time. I can write you more--at least, if it doesn’t bore you, in which case you have only to say so.