The Captain took another look through the periscope, and saw the familiar level floor of the sea blending with the pink and grey of the dawn just as he had seen it on so many previous mornings. He looked forward along his boat and saw the sleeping forms of sailors all the way along the battery deck cloths till his eye was attracted by a pair of sea-boots that projected through the gap in the wardroom curtain. Those were his First Lieutenant's boots, and his First Lieutenant, he knew well, was snoring loudly beyond them. He threw his cigarette end impatiently down the periscope well and began slowly moving the heavy periscope round, shuffling around with it as he swept the clearing horizon. It seemed a silly thing to be keeping the morning watch, of all watches, when he had two young and lazy officers to work for him. Their eyes were younger than his, and his were more valuable to the country anyway. It seemed absurd that only he and four "diving hands" should be awake, while all the rest snored. Why should he, an experienced and skilled officer, be at work at half-past four on a dull morning? Why, when he was a junior Lieutenant ... he straightened up from the eyepiece.... "Call the First Lieutenant!" An hour later the situation in the E boat was the same, except for the fact that a gloomy officer in a soiled sweater and a pair of still more soiled grey flannel trousers plodded round the periscope pedestal, while a pair of stockinged feet showing through the curtain showed whither the Captain's train of thought had led him. The crew still dozed fore and aft the boat. At regular intervals the hydroplane motors buzzed noisily as a turn of the wheels corrected her depth; from right aft came the monotonous ticking of a main motor that slowly turned the port propeller and urged the boat lazily along. In the wardroom the Captain, supremely oblivious to a monotonous drip of leaking water from a seam directly over his outthrown left hand, was back in the days before the war, when the Berkeley Hounds had had three forty-five minute bursts in a day, and he had ridden all three on the same horse. In his dreams he seemed to hear the drumming of many horses' hoofs on the sloping pastures, and the clash and tinkle of stirrups touching as the crowded field fought for room at the first fence. Then he woke and lay propped on one elbow, with a leg thrown over the side of his bunk, while his heart missed two complete beats. He had not heard the order of "action stations," that came from the periscope position, but he knew well the only possible order that could send men rushing past him to man the bow tubes. He pulled his sea-boots on as he sat up, then jumped down and covered the distance aft to the periscope in half a dozen swift strides. The First Lieutenant, his face alight with suppressed emotions, stepped clear and spoke: "Fritz--bow-on, I think--big one"--then dashed forward to superintend the men at the bow tubes.