The articles that were removed were not really thrown overboard, but were moved to out of the way places and marked with a tag which read: "Overboard." These tags furnished about the only element of fun in the entire practice. A mischievous boy, who may have been too familiar with the ship's Angora goat--you know goats have a way of doing things to persons when the persons are leaning over sometimes, and do not expect anything unusual to happen--or who didn't like the way the goat refused to eat tin cans occasionally and also spurned a pot of nice fresh paint, tied one of the labels to Billy's horns. Billy thought it was a decoration and if he had been a jackass instead of a goat would have heehawed with the rest of the crowd. Then there was a little rascal of a youngster who is always getting into trouble because of his pranks and all too often has to be summoned to the mast for his offences, where he gets regularly penalties of from five to ten hours extra duty and grins as soon as the Captain's back is turned. Something had to be done about him. A shipmate stole up behind him and fixed an overboard tag on his back. For hours he carried it about and was surprised to see that suddenly he had become popular, while the rest of the crew grinned and laughed and slapped their sides just as ordinary folks do on April fool day when a sedate man goes down the street with a rag pinned to his coat tail. But why should they be nervous about the shooting? Well, if for three months you had been working almost day and night in the practice of loading and firing guns, had been lifting, pushing, pulling things about to represent great and small projectiles and bags of powder, and if you had been drilling so as not to make a false step or move and had been getting up team work so as to do your work in the shortest possible time, where fractions of seconds count; if you had a gun crew or were a member of one where probably one-half of the men had never heard a big gun go off before and there was danger that you would go gun shy; if for weeks and weeks you had been told to do exactly this and that and never to do that and this, and a lot of other tremendously important things had been dinned into your ears, especially matters relating to safety, and you realized that some blunder of yours might endanger not only yourself and your mates, but the ship itself; if you recalled that the navy gives a prize to the best crew on the fleet for each kind of gun fired and there is also a ship's prize for the best work of these guns, and that if you did your work well and won out there would be from $20 to $60, or possibly more, for yourself and each of your mates; if you knew how one gun's crew bets it will beat its rival; if you knew how every man on every ship is intensely eager to get the naval trophy in shooting for his own ship, so that all hands can put on proper airs and say in a deprecating way: "Of course we were glad to get