A suspicious vessel is sighted, headed for Norway, Denmark, or Holland. She must be hailed, stopped, and boarded to make sure she is not carrying cotton or rubber, or other contraband of war intended for Germany. No matter how rough the sea or what the temperature, this duty must be done. "We have just crawled into port again," wrote an officer; "what fearful weather it has been, nothing but gales, rain and snow, with rough seas. Two nights out of the last four were terrible and for the last fortnight it seems to have been one incessant gale, sometimes from the east, and then, for a change, from the west, with rain all the time. The strictest lookout must be kept at all times, as with the rough seas that are going now, a submarine's periscope takes a bit of spotting, likewise a floating mine, the lookout hanging on to the rigging in blinding rain, with seas drenching over them for hours at a time, peering into the darkness." W. Macneile Dixon gives the following vivid account of the work of the British navy. "So it goes, and none save these who know the sea can form a picture or imagine at all the unrelaxing toil and strain aboard these ocean outposts that link northern with southern climes and draw their invisible barrier across the waters. The sea, if you would traffic with her, demands a vigilance such as no landsman dreams of, but here you have men who to the vigilance of the mariner have added that of the scout, who to the sailor's task have added the sentry's, and on an element whose moods are in ceaseless change, today bright as the heavens, tomorrow murky as the pit. "To this rough duty in northern seas what greater contrast than that other in southern, the naval bombardment of the Dardanelles? How broad and various the support given by the British fleet to the Allies can thus be judged. Separated each from the other by some thousands of miles, the one fleet spread over leagues of ocean, kept every ship its lonely watch, while the bombarding vessels, concentrated in imposing strength, attempted to force a passage through a channel, the most powerfully protected in the world. Unsuccessfully, it is true, but in the grand manner of the old and vanished days when war had still something of romance, and was less the hideous thing it has become.