"These are but episodes in the long roll of honor. You will find others in the quite peaceful occupation of minesweeping, or the search for mines--'fishing' the navy calls it--that the impartial German scatters to trip an enemy, perhaps a friend, an equal chance and it matters not which, an occupation for humanitarians and seekers after a quiet life. On this little business alone a thousand ships and fourteen thousand fishermen have been constantly engaged. Take the case of Lieutenant Parsons, who was blown up in his trawler, escaped with his life, and undisturbed continued to command his group of sweepers. On that day near Christmas time they blew up eight and dragged up six other mines, while, as incidents within the passage of ten crowded minutes, his own ship and another were damaged by explosions and a third destroyed! Read that short chapter of North Sea history and add this, for a better knowledge of these paths of peace, from the letter of an officer: 'Things began to move rapidly now. There was a constant stream of reports coming from aloft. "Mine ahead, Sir," "Mine on the port bow, Sir"; "There is one, Sir, right alongside," and on looking over the bridge I saw a mine about two feet below the surface and so close that we could have touched it with a boat hook. . . . After an hour at last sighted the minesweepers, which had already started work.' "One may judge of these North Sea activities from the record of a single lieutenant of the Naval Reserve who, besides attending to other matters, destroyed forty or fifty mines, twice drove off an inquisitive German Taube, attacked an equally inquisitive Zeppelin, twice rescued a British seaplane and towed it into safety; rescued in June the crew of a torpedoed trawler, sixteen men, also the crew of a sunk fishing vessel; in July assisted two steamers that had been mined, saving twenty-four of the sailors; in September assisted another steamer, rescued three men from a mined trawler, towed a disabled Dutch steamer and assisted in rescuing the passengers; in November assisted a Norwegian steamer, rescued twenty-four men, and also a Greek steamer which had been torpedoed and rescued forty. "Some day it will all be chronicled, and not the least fascinating record will be that of men who, perhaps, never fired a shot but enlarged their vision of the recesses of the enemy mind in other ways and met his craft by deeper craft, or navigated African rivers, fringed by desolate mangrove swamps, in gunboats, or hammered down the Mediterranean in East Coast trawlers, boys on their first command, or saw with their own eyes things they had believed to be fables. "'We travel about 1000 miles a week, most of it in practically unknown seas, full of uncharted coral reefs, rocks, islands, whose existence even is unknown. And by way of making things still more difficult we keep meeting floating islands.