It must not be supposed, however, that a war game is often so frivolous as this one, for in the ordinary way any such "spying" is strictly forbidden. Yet few games, perhaps, have been more useful than this one, for certainly half the players must have had impressed upon them in the most direct and unexpectedly forcible of ways the urgent necessity of taking no information for granted and also of sifting it all most carefully, which was the object sought. And if in the hereafter any one of them is the repository of important Service secrets he will have to be a very wily spy who secures them from him. There cannot be much wrong while young officers can be found ready to sacrifice such little leisure as they get in studying war problems for amusement. It is only in the British Navy that--so far as I can ascertain--this is done. In other navies officially supervised games are plentiful enough, but with them, of course, there is not the same interest. Here and there isolated foreign ships have the game on board and use it for purposes akin to those for which the inventor designed it. Two such ships are the Russian _Bayan_ and _Novik_--the only two ships which have, so far, distinguished themselves in the present war. In connection with the former ship it is interesting to note that her captain was a regular attendant at the Grand Duke Alexander's games in St. Petersburg, and used there to be laughingly called the "War-Game Skobeleff." Skobeleff, it will be remembered, was that Russian general who, in the Turco-Russian War, led a hundred desperate forlorn hopes untouched, though all around him were killed or wounded. Any ship played by Captain Wiren of the _Bayan_ used to have similar extraordinary luck; as one Russian officer, who must have Irish blood in him, put it: "The enemy's hits on him were all misses." Strangely enough, the same luck has followed him in the present war--the _Bayan_ survived the torpedo attack of February 8th; in the battle of the 9th, though she charged the Japanese fleet, she was untouched; in the action of the 25th February, when Captain Wiren, with three Russian cruisers, tried to fight the entire Japanese squadron, two were badly mauled, but the _Bayan_ was not hurt. In concluding this brief sketch of naval war game from the popular standpoint a reference may be made to flying-machines, which some think will be the warships of the future. Rules of the aerial fights of the future are said to exist all ready cut and dried, together with an ingenious machine by which the aerial warship's moves can be made. There is, in fine, nothing in earth, sky, or sea, or under the sea, that has not been the subject of rules in this "War by Kindergarten." [Illustration: _The Phoenix and the Carpet._ _By E. NESBIT._] Copyright 1904, by George Newnes, Limited. XI.--THE BEGINNING OF THE END.