The work on the bridge also soon excites your admiration. When you are in squadron or fleet formation it's a different game from when you are alone. Then all you have to do is to keep your course and go sailing along at the speed set for you, keep your eye on things, receive reports, give this and that order, when you are through set down a record of what has happened in the deck logbook. All that's simple and easy compared with cruising in a fleet. With a fleet you are not on the bridge five minutes before you are aware that a peculiar kind of game is being played. It is "Watch the Flagship." The watch officer, the signal officer, the quartermasters, the signal boys, are all engaged in the work. Let a signal go up from the flagship. There is a hasty peep through glasses and then a hoarse cry for certain flags, a rush for the bunting, a quick bending of it on the halyards and then a mad rush by half a dozen lads across the bridge as the signals are hoisted. Hurry; be the first to answer, is the sentiment inspiring all. After the signal is hoisted you take a hasty look around, and you grin as this or that ship hasn't got hers up yet, and you say to yourself that it was pretty smart work. When the first sign of a flutter comes from the flagship that the pennants are coming down the hoarse yell of "Haul down!" comes like a thunderclap; and woe betide the clumsy signal boy who gets the halyards foul and doesn't have the signals out of sight before the flagship has hers hidden. Or perhaps it is approaching sunset and the time comes to lower the speed cones for the night and start the masthead and truck lights to glimmering. Intently all hands watch the flagship and at the first tremor of the cone the boy begins to haul down. In a jiffy not a cone is to be seen at the yards on the entire fleet. Then there is the night signalling with the ardois red and white lights. There flashes from the flagship a row of vertical red lights, four of them. "Cornet!" is the cry. It means that each ship must turn on the same signal as an answer to attention call. Then the flagship talks, with this and that combination of red and white lights, all flashed so fast that before the impression of one combination fades from the eye two or three others have followed and you wonder how on earth any one can make them out. But as each one is flashed a boy calls out the letter and another writes it down the cubbyhole where the navigator's chart is sheltered, and you find that these messages are recorded as fast as a telegrapher could write out his clicks.