leaned forward in his chair and meditatively relit his cigar. "So that," he concluded, "was the first and only time the engines really bothered us. It was close enough while it lasted, though. Still, we got by."

Young Carrington drew in his breath sharply. "Close enough," he echoed. "I should say it was. That's the only trouble with you pioneers, Lieutenant. You get so interested in what you're doing that you get reckless, and then you blaze ahead with some fool experiment, and the first thing you know something happens. Then they grapple your boat up, and lay you all decently away on dry land, where you belong, and some other chap has the benefit of your experience, and knows one thing more to avoid if he's anxious to keep his health. It's glorious, Lieutenant, but it's going ahead too fast. There's such a thing as being too brave."

Osborne smiled. "Oh, well, of course there's some risk," he acquiesced; "no one would deny that. But not nearly so much as you think. We're pretty well prepared for all emergencies now, and in the last analysis the interior of a submarine isn't the only dangerous place in the world. It sounds trite to say 'you never can tell,' but that's what danger and death amount to, after all."

Vanulm nodded assent. "You're right, Lieutenant," he said. "You see it and read of it every day. A man makes a trip through darkest Africa and comes home to be run over by a trolley car. We take a thousand risks by land and sea, far and wide, and then come to peace and safety, and break our leg going down the cellar stairs. 'You never can tell' hits it about right for most of us."

Osborne nodded. "I'm afraid I've monopolized the conversation too much already," he said, "but I'd like to tell you a queer illustration of this that we had at the yards a year or so ago. One of the construction men there was a Norwegian named Rolfson, a man with the most remarkable head for heights, barring none, that I think I've ever seen. He was celebrated even among his mates, and you can imagine what that means among men who are just as much at home walking about like flies on top of a girder sixty feet from the ground as we are seated here at this table this moment. Well, one day this fellow—not out of bravado, you understand; he wasn't that kind, but just because he took a notion to do it—after he got through a job he was doing on the mainmast of a big seven-master, deliberately climbed clean up to the main truck, somehow crawled on top of it, and stood there, one hundred and eighty-seven feet above the deck, waving his cap to the fellows below. How was that for absolute nerve?

"Well, the point I am coming to is this: Three or four months later this same man, working on a staging about thirty-five feet above the deck of a bark, sitting down, mind you, with a support on either side of him to hang on to, fell and broke his neck. We never knew just what the trouble really was. He might have looked down, I suppose, or might have been taken suddenly ill; possibly all at once he lost his nerve. That happens sometimes. We never knew. So, you see, you can't always tell what's risky and what isn't."

He stopped abruptly. There was a moment's silence, broken presently by Gordon. "Still," he said, "to a landsman like myself there's something uncanny about a submarine. What does a man think about just before he goes down for a twenty-four-hour plunge, Osborne? Does he get worried about death and eternity and the state of his soul, or does he simply wonder whether or not he's forgotten his tobacco?"

Osborne laughed. "Why, speaking for myself," he answered, "I'm generally too busy figuring on where we're bound in this world to wonder much, if anything should happen, where I'd be bound in the next. I suppose it all depends on a man's temperament, and even that doesn't always work out the way you'd think. I know the last time we went down there was one of the crew, a quiet, rather gloomy old chap, with no nerves at all, just the kind of man you need in our business, who turned out, very much as you might have supposed, to be a firm believer in predestination. Now, going down didn't worry that fellow a bit. In fact, I'd have liked it better if he had worried a little more, I like to see the men just as anxious as I am to know that everything's in first-class shape. But his ideas were that if we were going to be drowned, we were going to be drowned, and that was all there was to it. Now, on the other hand, we had another chap who was the most reckless man in the whole bunch, really a regular dare-devil, afraid of nothing afloat or ashore. This fellow, also, as you might have supposed, so far from believing in predestination, didn't believe in anything at all—an out-and-out atheist. Result was that out of regard for his precious life he was tremendously in earnest to see we'd taken every possible precaution before we went under. Rather a curious result, I thought, and something of a blow at practical religion if we should advertise, 'Picked men wanted to ship on submarine Anhinga. Atheists given preference over all others.'"

There was a general laugh. "Poor old Religion," said Carrington reflectively; "she's had to take some pretty hard knocks lately. What with enemies without and factions within, I sometimes wonder what the future of the Church is really going to be."

Doctor Norton, the host of the evening, nodded assent. "I suppose the trouble really is," he said, "that there's such an endless field for speculation in such matters, and people's minds work so very diversely anyway, that no one ever really quite agrees with any one else about anything. Hence the rows."

Carrington shook his head in dissent. "That's going it a little too strong, Doctor," he objected. "I imagine most of us think along about the same lines on religious matters these days, don't we?"

Norton smiled. "Well," he answered, "nothing easier than to test the question, right here and now. I should say the five of us make up a fairly representative crowd—a stock broker, a merchant, a naval officer, a journalist and a medical man. Now, if we'll all agree to give our honest ideas—our honest ideas, mind you, not hackneyed stuff we've been told or that we pretend to believe—on religion, or the probability of a hereafter, or however you choose to phrase it, a comparison of results might prove entertaining, although the subject, I'll grant, is a little shopworn and not nearly so interesting as what the lieutenant has been telling us about submarines. Is it a bargain?"

There was a ready chorus of assent, and Norton, after a moment's pause, continued: "I don't mind setting the example and confessing first. My creed at least has the merit of simplicity. I haven't the faintest shadow of a belief in any kind of a future life. I haven't had the good fortune to see any evidence of it, and I never expect to. There's one view. Now, Carrington, suppose you unbosom yourself."

Carrington pondered. "Why," he said at length, "I suppose I might be described as a hopeful agnostic. Lots of hope, but no belief. I guess that covers it pretty well."

Norton nodded. "Well, we're not so very far apart," he said more gravely. "I suppose practically every man likes to indulge his hopes at times. Certainly, when I think of my wife and children, I like to try to convince myself against my reason and my judgment. That spark is born in us somehow, and of course furnishes a somewhat fanciful argument, if it's worthy of being called that, to our good friends in the pulpit. I'll concede that much to Carrington's view; I like to hope, but that's all it amounts to. Vanulm, enlighten us."

The brewer shook his head. "Not I," he said promptly; "I don't commit myself one way or the other. In fact, I never could see what difference the whole discussion really made. From one point of view, you