She’s too pretty for your thumb-crushing blacksmiths to spoil.” When reminded that he was an alien, he treated the objection as the thinnest of evasive pleas. “King George is my man; there are no diamonds in his garters,” he wrote. The Lords of the Admiralty, who never in their sheltered lives had read such letters as now poured in upon them, gasped, collapsed, and gave to the benevolent neutral all that he asked. Cæsar worshipped the big motor-boat and her astonishing commander. His first love wrapped itself round the twin engines, two of them, six-cylinders each, 120 horse-power. They were ducks of engines which never gave any trouble, because Cæsar and the two American engineers—I had almost written nurses—were always on the watch to detect the least whimper of pain. But though he never neglected his beloved engines, the mysterious fascinations of the three-pounder gun in the bows gradually vanquished his mature heart. Her deft breech mechanism, her rapid loading, the sweet, kindly way she slipped to and fro in her cradle, became charms before which he succumbed utterly. Cæsar and the gun’s high-priest, a petty officer gunlayer, became the closest of friends, and the pair of them would spend hours daily cleaning and oiling their precious toy. The American lieutenant had his own bizarre notions of discipline—he thought nothing of addressing the petty officer as “old horse”; but he worked as hard as Cæsar himself, kept everyone in the best of spirits through the vilest spells of weather, and was a perpetual fount of ingenious plans for the undoing of Fritz. The _Mighty Buzzer_—named from her throbbing exhaust—was a happy ship. The _Buzzer’s_ career as a king’s ship was brief, and her death glorious. One night, or rather early morning, she was far out in the misty jaws of a Highland loch, within which temporarily rested many great battle-cruisers. Cæsar despised these vast and potent vessels. “What use are they?” he would ask of his chief. “There is nothing for them to fight, and they would all have been sunk long ago but for us.” Fast motor-boats, with 120 horse-power engines, twenty-five knots of speed—thirty at a pinch, untruthfully claimed the Lieutenant—and beautiful 3-pounder guns were in Cæsar’s view, the last word in naval equipment. The Lieutenant would shake his head gravely at his Sub’s exuberant ignorance. “They are gay old guys just now,” he would reply, “and feeling pretty cheap. But some day they will get busy and knock spots off Fritz’s hide. You Britishers are darned slow, but when you do fetch a gun it’s time to shin up trees. The Germs have stirred up the British Lion real proper and, I guess, wish now they’d let him stay asleep.”