merchant service; and the Admiralty ruled it would not take men out of a ship abroad-desiring as many British subjects as possible aboard merchantmenbut would consider applications only after arrival in the United Kingdom. Men in the China trade pleaded for release from their ships, and received it on condition they would return home in their usual capacity as officers and not as passengers. Officers full of hope started home; vessels they were signed on were commandeered by the fleet in the Mediterranean, and eventually, after traveling twice around the globe via Suez and Panama, ended months later

at the time and was thrown thirty yards away in our trench. Needless to say I was glad it was our trench, not the German's, for we are not much further from theirs. When trenches, they fumed us and shelled us for we were at Festubert occupying German

hours. It was terrible.

ANZAC, GALLIPOLI.

The things we see are worse than hell can ever be. Yet one gets callous to it all. Here's a little story that really happened a few days ago. A man was brought down to the hospital at Anzac. His face was an awful mess and the doctor said, "Well, how did you get this lot?"

The poor wretch started to grin and said: "Well, you see me and Bill was throwing

bombs over to the Turks and Bill lights a bomb fuse and it didn't appear to be burning right, so Bill 'e siz, 'I'll make you fizz, you 'eathen!' and starts to blow on it, when orf it went and blew off Bill's bloomin' head. Hee, hee, I didn't arf larf!"

H. M. T. Same Ship, SALONIKA.

We had some nurses aboard here to-day. They were driven out of Serbia and it is something awful what some of them have gone through. Sleeping at times in barns and old lofts, and occasionally on the roadside; living on the same rations as the Tommies tinned beef and biscuits. Poor girls, we were so sorry for them we set them up, and they quite enjoyed a decent dinner aboard here.

H. M. S. Tiger, Nov. 27, '16.

Did you know I got a "mention" in the Jutland affair?

LA PALLICE, FRANCE.

He died very happy at being called out to do special duty. He rushed a dangerous bridge in an armored car at thirty-five miles an hour. I attended his naval funeral. We're all glad he was not taken prisoner. I am now a motor-cyclist scout.

I failed in my exams for mate. I am colorblind so I joined the Artists' Rifles.

H. M. S. Sirus.

We are doing high seas policeman's work, overhauling and examining merchant ships. The most exciting time happened when I landed with a party of thirty-nine sailors and marched eighteen miles in a night and occupied a village. Galer of the Ophir is in Gibraltar with a prize crew in charge a Swedish steamer caught loading contraband cargo from German steamers sheltering in Teneriffe. Griggs is on the hospital ship Rewa with our home fleet as fourth. He may get a chance to cool the Kaiser's heated brow. Sanders of the R. N. R. has been awarded the V. C., without the nature of the exploit being published. He is a lieut. commander and only thirty.

LONDON.

You really ought to come over for a Zep raid; they are great fun, a most lovely sight in the ray of our search-light, just like the governor's silver-wrapped cigars. I have been in three or four raids already; it is fine sport firing at them with "antis." My youngest brother is in the R. F. Corps, 'some birdman." So we both hunt Zeps.

Tribulations of a youngster:

PORT SAID, August, 1916. Despite all the wonders I have seen since the war began, I would give it all for a frigid ice-cream soda. Don't laugh; think of this heat-the glass registers 110° and not much

VOL. CXXXVI.-No. 811.-6

different at night. Picture me brown as an Arab and working in only a singlet and overalls. You know the Murillo is a refrigerator ship. Refrigeration has a cool sound, but one has to wish to be a quarter of beef to really enjoy it. There is not even a refrigeration-room for ship's stores, just a little ice-chest on deck. We had only been out a week when the ship's fresh meat went bad.

From another youngster, arriving in Australia on a sailing-ship and anxious to get in the thick of it:

Here I am at the end of the passage and thumping glad to be there. I have come to the conclusion that to some with a very lofty idea of duty, taking a royal in during a rain squall, or scooping the dirt out of the chicken-coop may constitute a splendid situation in time of war, but to Sandy SNo, sir! Nor are that ginger-headed, walrusfaced old Welsh mate, or the weak-willed noodle of a second mate who delights in catching sharks and albatrosses, ship-mates for me. This is a spanking war with a chance to do something spanking.

I'm lucky and won the D. S. Cross and received it from the King at Buckingham Palace. I am not sure which was the worse ordeal. Do write one of your cheerful letters to mother. Bill is at the front in France, a sub-Lieutenant in the A. S. C., Jack is full Lieutenant in the Field Artillery and both have turned boon German-killers-two of my sisters are volunteer nurses, one in hospital for Belgian soldiers, other for British wounded-Mother, needless to state, is in an awful state.

GUAYAQUIL, ECUADOR.

We are carting coal around to H. M. ships and have had no mail. In a paper I see a wireless from Berlin announcing the sinking of the British S. S. Harpalyce and twentyeight lost; my brother was second officer. We passed each other at sea a year ago. It is terrible, I don't know how long before I will get news from home about him.

H. M. S. Majestic, DARDANELLES, April 1915. The Queen Elizabeth led us into action with her band playing "Everybody's Doing It."

H. M. S. Agincourt, July 19, 1917.

Since the Jutland affair I've had no chance to use my turret on the Huns. I am just the same erratic wandering chap. Rather fed up with bugles, pipes, saluting and salaaming and stuck in same spot, never seeing any land except our dreary base, which is miles away from civilization. Months on end we never see a soul except Naval people. Occasionally we get to the fishing village of

but these are red-letter days in our lives. An evening ashore is absolutely unknown. Three of the Glendon crowd are here. Hodge is on the Antrim and Emwoldren is on the Duncan. Bayford is on submarine. He won D. S. C. at Gallipoli early in the war, so did Acheson of the Indra Line. Poor Dendreno, who joined the flying corps, was shot down on the French front. Wish I was on the destroyers; they are the only ones that see occasional Huns.

Here is the record of one family:

M. F. A. 103, O. T. Uncas, September 22, 1916. The Uncas became oiler No. 2 and we loaded our cargo of fuel oil in the East and ended up in a region where shot and shell wandered around. After getting rid of our precious cargo we turned around and came east again for another full load, and this time all the way home. The wife keeping watch during the hours I had to sleep, and glad I was to have her sharp eyes in the submarine area, for the chief officer was old and past his work. Arrived safely in the old country, the wife left me at Falmouth, and then away under sealed orders. Ten days or so before I could get word to Mrs. C.; of course silly women folk imagined subs had got me. We wandered down to River Tyne and dry-docked there; unfortunately the Chinese were restless so had to stay aboard with only two days' leave, first since outbreak of war. I reported to Admiralty, being an R. N. R. officer, but was told (as usual) to continue on my ship. I'd dearly loved to have been told to proceed to a Naval depot, for it is not all honey to be away on your lonesome, knowing that if attacked one mistake ends you. Now about my brothers. At the evacuation of Gallipoli one of them received orders to proceed with five hundred men to Anzac and destroy stores. He arrived there after the guns had been withdrawn and had a merry time. Turks-no opposition-shelled them night and day; however, the boy did his work and left Anzac with not very heavy casualties. After two days' rest, same job at Helles, if you please; bit thick, eh! Had a beastly time at Helles, a big gale came on and they could not work, only sit in the dugouts being shelled all the time. Finally finished the job and he brought away all but ten of his men. He was mentioned in orders of the day, congratulated and promoted. Next brother C. came home from India, joined up, won his commission, and is now in France. Before leaving he was married; how, is rather amusing-he wires his fiancée at ten to be ready that same

day at two. Bride goes to London for special license; finally my brother arrives, hot, dusty, breathless, five minutes late. After the event the two innocents find they have no notion of where to spend the six-day honeymoon. Imagine fifty excited relations of all ages, each propounding his or her own view on the subject and accompanying them to the station. Finally, amid much noise, the spot is selected for them, and they have to travel down in the crowded Guards van, C. trying his best to look dignified as becomes a Lieutenant in H. M.'s Army. Next brother left the sea, went to France as a private in Public Schools Batt., refused a commission before going out, saw service in trenches and was marched out and told his duty was to take a commission. brother is in the A. S. C. and saw the Uncas in harbor at Port Said, but could not get off to see me. None of us have seen each other since war began. Now if you are not fed up with me and my brothers, you ought to be. To finish up with, the dear old Mater and Pater sit at home, longing and yet dreading to see the post and newspapers

come.

Next

On every sea of the seven the men of Britain's Merchant Marine have carried out their appointed tasks. They have carried troops and munitions to far places, wherever campaigns are under way to Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, Salonika, German colonial Africa, and to France. They have been in the fighting on patrol duty, on trawlers bound submarine-hunting or mine-sweeping, and on ships doing a dozen unheard - of things. When the veil of mystery now spread over their comings and goings lifts, and their ships sail in New York Harbor, not in lead color, but with white deck-houses and house flags flying, and the S. S. British Empire-no longer H. M. Transport; then, in the companionship of the kind folks of the institute, untold deeds will come to light. Meanwhile their letters come to Mr. Wood; and other letters such as this: He was killed in action. . . It is very lonely for we women folks in England.

Certainly, when the question is asked in years to come, "What did you do in the Great War?" the answer need but be, "On Admiralty Service, if you please, sir!"

I

WAS with Twining when it happened. Nothing but thatactual presence on the spot-could give me right to tell the tale; for, untypical as it is, irrelevant, unique, unexpected, to sit at home and imagine it would be merely morbid. Some people may think it morbid to relate it, in any case. To such I can only say that facts need no apology. The thing occurred. What is morbid is the comment of the people very far away who never understood. I was there; day by day, by his side, I saw him through it, and I can honorably assert that Twining was sincere to the core, honest to the bitter end. Though why chosen for his peculiar destiny, I have never been able to guess.

Since my day they have set a statue on the Kingsborough campus that is an adequate portrait of Roger Twining's type.

I don't know what it calls itself, but it is a young athlete, half in a gown, half out of it, with a football under his arm and hockey shoes on his feet, with a Bible and tennis racquets heaped vaguely against him—a symbolic presentment, I take it, of young Kingsborough going forth to preach the Gospel to every creature. A very nice person, A very nice person, that statue, but too heterogeneously equipped. Twining, to the life; if he could once have got his Polynesians to play basket-ball, he could have gone on, I believe, to expound the Pauline epistles to them with fluent ease. For he was not a fool, and he was the best fellow in the world. Only, you see, by Twining's time at Kingsborough (he graduated a few years after I did) they had completely canalized religion between Y. M. Č. A. embankments. No one cared about categorical imperatives any more-not even Tug Lambert when he was drunk. The statue is the sion of the Kingsborough spirit which

expres

moulded Twining. For the very special trick life was going to play him, he was a little handicapped by all those implements of sport. They didn't fit his fate. Variety without complication-“muscular," all of it. And Roger Twining was to be an optimist caught by the Furies, a lad by no means Prometheus chained to the Promethean rock. If it weren't for the old Kingsborough clannishness, I should be tempted to say that he was the seat of a terrific tempest-and was himself only teapot size. But, then, I have always stuck to the categorical imperative; and, while it is an open question in my mind whether you can ever really convert a heathen, I am quite sure that you cannot convert him with basket-ball. In that I side with Aunt Miriam.

Twining himself felt something of it in those first discouraged days at his remote, incredible post, where, by mismanagement at home and the inopportune death on the high seas of the man who was to follow him at once, he was for a time in sole charge. (You will have made out, I hope, that he was a missionary.) As he put it to me petulantly one night on his big verandah, “If I could only have worked backward instead of forward, unlearned all the things a Christian child knows, acquired a totem instead of a diploma!" He was deep in Tylor and Frazer at the time, and beginning to see why the once famous Mission was moribund and the Catholics had it all their own way with the beautiful, dying race. He was coming to realize, and not without regret, that basket-ball can never take the place of good, soul-shaking ritual. Besides, the natives would not play basket-ball. They preferred to spear fish, and get drunk of an evening, and smile as no Christian has ever smiled.

Now let me get to work and abridge for you the preluding weeks.

Pure Kingsborough clannishness led