him from the bridge—he kept wondering in the back of his brain what sort of a fight the duel would resolve itself into when both had exhausted their shells. Luckily, he did not have to face that problem.

"Both ships, according to G——'s account, began blazing at each other as soon as they came in range, and, as each was eager to fight it out to a finish, the distance separating them was, for a while, reduced as rapidly as possible. At something like three thousand yards, however, some sort of a rapid-fire gun burst into action on the Trafalgar. 'It didn't appear to be doing me much harm,' said G—— in telling of it, 'but the incessant "pom-pom" of the accursed thing got so much on my nerves that I drew off far enough to dull the edge of its infernal yapping.'

"A thing which came near to putting the Carmania out of the running before she had completed the polishing off of her opponent was the shell which I have spoken of as violating the sanctity of the Captain's cabin—the one that burned everything but the Norfolk jacket. This projectile—a four-inch—though (probably owing to the small resistance offered by the light upper works) it did not explode, generated enough heat in its passage to start a fire. Beginning on G——'s personal effects, this conflagration spread to the bridge, destroying the navigating instruments and ultimately making it impossible to remain there—the latter a serious blow in itself. What made this fire especially troublesome was the difficulty, because of the cutting of the main, of bringing water to bear upon it. As it was, it was necessary to head the Carmania 'down the wind' to reduce the draught fanning the flames. Nothing else would have saved her. Except for one thing, this expedient would have enabled the now thoroughly worsted (though G—— didn't know it) Trafalgar to withdraw from the action, and this was that the latter was herself on fire and had to take the same course willy-nilly. From that moment on the battle was as irretrievably joined as one of those old Spanish knife-duels in which the opponents were locked together in a room to fight to a finish. Often as not, so they say, the victor in one of these fights only survived the loser by minutes or hours, and so would it have been in this instance had they not finally been able to extinguish the fire on the Carmania.

"G——'s account of the way he had to carry on after being driven from the bridge—it was really a splendid bit of seamanship—was funny in the extreme, but the reality must have been funnier still, that is, if that term can be applied to anything happening while shells are bursting and blowing men to bits every few seconds. G—— is one of the biggest men in the Navy—around the waist, I mean—so it wasn't to be expected of him to be very shifty on his feet. And yet, by the irony of Fate, it was he of all men who was suddenly confronted with a task that required only less 'foot-work' than it did 'head-work.' With the battle going on all the time, they rigged up some sort of a 'jury' steering gear, or it may be that they steered her by her screws. At any rate, G—— had to con her from the most commanding position he could find on one of the after decks, or rather, as he had no longer voice-pipe communication with the engine-room, he had to keep dashing back and forth (it must have been for all the world like a batsman running in cricket) between two or three commanding positions. 'If I wanted to open the range a bit,' he said, 'I had to nip for'ard, wait till there was an interval in both gun-fire and shell-burst, and yell down a hatchway' (or was it a ventilator?) 'to the engine-room to "Slow port!" or if I suddenly found it imperative to open the distance, I had to make the same journey and pass the word down to "Stop starboard!" The very thought of that mad shuttling back and forth under the equatorial sun used to make poor G—— mop his forehead and pour himself a fresh drink every time he told the story.

"Battered and burning fiercely as both ships were, G—— confessed that even at this juncture he could not rid himself of the feeling that neither of them had enough shells to sink the other. 'I was racking my brain for some plan of action to follow when that moment arrived,' he said, 'when suddenly the Trafalgar began to heel sharply and started to sink. It was our second or third salvo, which had holed her badly at the water-line, that did the business. She had kept steaming and fighting for close to an hour and a quarter afterwards, though.'

"G—— told us one very good story about his Gunnery officer. 'It was just before the shell which started the fire struck us,' he said, 'that Y——'s sun helmet was knocked off—I don't remember whether it was by the wind or the concussion of the firing. Seeing it fall to the deck below, he ran to the rail of the bridge and began shouting for some one to bring it back to him. Before long, luckily, a seaman who had heard the shouting in a lull of the firing, poked his head out to see what it was about, and presently came puffing up the ladder with the fugitive head-piece. I say luckily, because the gun-control for the whole ship was suspended while Y—— waited for that infernal helmet. And the funniest thing about it all was that, when I ventured to suggest a few days later that it might be well if he made use of the chin-strap of his helmet the next time he was in action, he claimed to have no recollection whatever of the incident—thought he had been "sticking to his guns" all the time. Just shows how a man's brain works in air-tight compartments when he is really busy.'

"The Surgeon of the Carmania (continued the Captain)—a splendid chap who had given up a lucrative West-end practice and sworn he was under forty (although he was really fifty-two) in order to get a chance to do something for his country—told me many stories to prove the splendid spirit of the men that passed under his hands during and after the fight. Though most of the crew were only Royal Naval Reservists, with no experience of and but little training for fighting, it appears that they stood what is perhaps the hardest of all trials—that of seeing their mates wounded and killed beside them—like seasoned veterans.

"'There was one stout-hearted young Cockney,' said the Surgeon, 'whom, after I had finished removing a number of shell fragments from various parts of his anatomy, I asked what he thought of the fight. "Rippin', Sir," he replied, grinning ecstatically through the bandage that held up the flap of a torn cheek; "rippin', never been in one like it before." Then, as his eye caught the smile which I could not quite repress at the lifetime of naval battling suggested by that "nev'r afore," he concluded with "Not ev'n in Whitechapel."'

"The Surgeon came across one man who insisted that the blood flowing from a ragged tear in his arm was really spattered there when one of his mates—whose mangled body he bestrode—had been decapitated by a shell a few minutes before; and there was one lot of youngsters who went on cheerily 'Yo-heave-ho-ing' in hoisting some badly needed shells which were so slippery with blood that they had to be sanded before they could be handled. Grimly pathetic was the story he told me of a gunner whose torn hand he had just finished amputating and bandaging when some one shouted into the door of the dressing station that the Trafalgar was going down.

"'He crowded to a port I had had opened,' said the Surgeon, 'just in time to see one of the last salvoes from the Carmania go crashing into the side of the heeling enemy. "Huroor, boys," he shouted; "give 'em beans," and as he cheered he started (what had evidently been a