"This is Sigismund Krauss speaking." "Oh, yes." "I have received a message about Uncle Hyacinth." "I can't hear." "Uncle Hyacinth's appetite!" This was bellowed. "Oh, yes." The voice was very cautious and polite. "I want to know if it's important." "Whose appetite did you say?" "Uncle Hyacinth's!" This was like Hindenburg himself thundering. There seemed to be some sort of consultation at the other end of the wire. Then the reply came very clearly: "I'm sorry, but we cannot talk over the telephone. I can't hear anything you say. Please put your question in writing." It was an obvious lie for any one to say he could not hear the tremendous voice in which Herr Krauss had made his touching inquiry; but he fully understood the need for caution. He had tapped too many wires himself to blame his colleagues for timidity. He had only a minute to burst out of the telephone booth and regain the deck, before the gang-planks were hoisted in and the ship began to slide away to the open sea. He was more than annoyed, he was disgusted, to find that half the people on board were talking English. Two or three of them, including the captain, were actually British subjects; while the purser, a few of the stewards and several passengers were citizens of the United States. It was late that evening and the shore lights had all died away over the pitch-black water when the brass-bound trunk belonging to Mr. Neilsen, as we must call him henceforward, was carried into his stateroom by two grunting stewards. The mysterious letter could be of no use to the Fatherland now, and he certainly did not expect it to be important from a selfish point of view. Also, he was hungry, and he did not hurry over his dinner in order to decode it. It was only his curiosity that impelled him to do so before he turned in; but a kind of petrefaction overspread his well-fed countenance as the significance of the message dawned upon him. He sat on a suitcase in his somewhat cramped quarters and translated it methodically, looking up the meaning of each word in the code, like a very unpleasant schoolboy with a dictionary. He was nothing if not efficient, and he wrote it all down in pencil on a sheet of note-paper, in two parallel columns, thus: _Bon voyage_ _U-boats_ _Most_ _Instructed_ _Amusing_ _Sink_ _News_ _Argentine_ _Operation_ _Ships_ _Successful_ _Destruction_ _Uncle Hyacinth's_ _Hispaniola_ _Appetite_ _Essential_ _Splendid_ _Cancel_ _Six_ _Code number_ _Meals_ _Passage_ _Daily_ _Immediately_ Perhaps to make sure that his eyes did not deceive him Mr. Neilsen wrote the translation out again mechanically, in its proper form, at the foot of the page, thus: