He saluted as he spoke, and thereupon there fell to the floor, apparently from down the admiral's sleeve, three of the missing warships! What the admiral felt is better imagined than described. Fortunately for his reputation one model still remained stuck in his sleeve. In moving his own ships he had rested his arm on the Kaiser's vessels, and so lifted the lot unawares. All's well that ends well, and the Kaiser laughed most heartily; but there is an admiral in the German fleet whom it is in no way wise to talk to about naval war game. However, this admiral is not the only one who has met misadventure from war-game models, no less a person than the Japanese Admiral Togo heading the list of those who have had "naval war-game hand"--the result of inadvertently leaning on the masts of a model ship! To resume the description. Every player has assigned to him a particular ship, and this he moves simultaneously with all the others at the direction of his "admiral." Each move nominally occupies a minute of time--actually it usually takes more, and it is in the ways and means adopted to balance this that most of the confidential rules exist. A most essential part of the game is to counterfeit with all possible realism the hurry-scurry of an actual battle. [Illustration: A NAVAL WAR-GAME TARGET--ACTUAL SIZE.] The distance moved depends, of course, upon the speed of the ship represented. A flier like H.M.S. _Drake_, for instance, can cover as many as eight squares should full speed be ordered. This means eight hundred yards a minute--equivalent, approximately, to a speed of twenty-four knots per hour. In actual practice the ships do not move by squares, else a vessel proceeding along the diagonals would go much faster than one moving straight across; the squares merely exist to afford a rough means of guessing the range. Special measures are, therefore, employed. Innumerable rules cover such matters as increasing and decreasing speed, turning, and so forth. General conventions exist, but in actual practice the real turning circles of ships are alone made--and here, of course, confidential features are thick. The inventor of the game is probably the repository of more secrets in this respect than three of the best Naval Intelligence Departments of Europe put together. At the end of each "minute" more firing takes place. This is the characteristic feature of the game. Each player has a card with a plan of his ship showing guns, armour, etc., and divided into arbitrary vertical sections of twenty-five feet each. This card is known technically as a "scorer." Pictures of each ship, similarly divided, but showing no armour, and of different sizes for different ranges, are also provided. These are the "targets."