the ship cleared the smokehaze, she was obviously down by the head and steering wildly. Two auxiliary patrol vessels closed on her at full speed, and the nearest freighter increased speed and cut in ahead of her in readiness either to tow or screen. The torpedoed ship, after yawing vaguely for a few minutes, steadied back to the convoy's course, slowing her engines till she only just retained steerage way. There was a rapid exchange of signals between her and the escort vessels, and then an R.N. Commander on an adjacent bridge gave a sigh of relief. "Good man that," he said. "We'll have him in dry dock to-morrow. It hasn't flurried him a bit, and I like his nerve."

The explosion had caused more than the salvage vessels to leap into activity. The white track of the torpedo showed clearly after it had gone home, and the first to take action was a tramp, across whose bows the track passed. The tramp was a ship of the early 'nineties, and her full speed was at the most nine knots, but her skipper at once jammed her helm hard over to steer along the torpedo-wake with a somewhat optimistic hope of ramming. Two destroyers and an armed auxiliary did the same thing, with the result that the tramp skipper found himself suddenly in the oross-wash of the warships as they passed him at a few yards' distance at twenty knots. Somebody on the bridge of one of them screamed

a profane warning at him through a megaphone, and the skipper, after a hurried glance at the quivering destroyers' sterns, jumped to the telegraph and stopped his engines. A couple of seconds later his ship shook to a great detonation, and a mighty column of water rose and broke close ahead of him. He starboarded his helm and swung round after the rest of the convoy, his ship shaking to successive explosions as more escorting vessels arrived at the spot where he had turned.

As his torpedoes left the tubes the U-boat captain barked out an order. The attack had been fairly simple, but his hardest problem was only beginning. The boat's bow dipped sharply in answer to the tilted hydroplanes, and she began her long slide down to the two-hundred foot mark. She had got to fifty before a sound like a great hammer striking the hull told them of a successful torpedo-run. The Captain looked up from his watch and smiled. A moment later he was watching the gauges with a grave and impassive face. He knew that the fact of his torpedo hitting would mean greater difficulty for him in the next few hours than he would have known had he missed altogether. At a hundred feet the first depthcharge exploded, smashing gauge-glasses, electric lamps, and throwing a couple of men off their feet. The boat rooked and rolled under the shock, while orders were roared

through voice-pipes for more emergency lights to be switched on. More charges exploded as the boat slid downwards, but each charge was farther away than the last. The half-light of the hand-lamps round the periscope showed the source of a sound of pouring waterstwo rivets had been blown right out of the inner hull close before the conning-tower. The Captain shouted orders, and the submarine levelled off her angle and checked at the fifty metre line, while two men began frantically to break away the woodwork which stretched overhead and prevented the rivet-holes being plugged. At that depth the water poured in through the holes in solid bars, hitting the deck, bouncing back and spreading everywhere in & heavy spray which drenched oirouits and wires.

"Müller! where the devil are you? Start the pumps-I can't help it if they hear us. Start the pumps, fool!"

"But you will come up? You will

"Schweinhund! Gehorsam keit! Go!"

The pumps began to stamp and clatter as they drove the entering water out again, but above the noise of the pumps the Captain could hear the roaring note of propellers rushing far overhead. If it had not been for those infernal rivets, he thought, he would have been at three hundred feet by now, but he could not risk the extra wetting which a pressure of a hundred and thirty pounds to the inch on

the entering water would give to his circuits. The weight of extra water in the bilges was nothing-he could deal with that-though the thought of the six hundred odd fathoms of water between him and the bottom was a thing to remember anxiously in case of his getting negative buoyancy; but if this continual spray of salt water reached his motor circuits it would be fatal. He cursed the men who were vainly trying to block the rivet-holes with wood wedges, and jumping on the periscope table he tried to guide the end of a short plank, intended as a baffle-plate, across the stream. As he stood working, a terrific concussion shook the U-boat from stem to stern. The bows rose till men began to slip aft down the wet deck, and from aft came a succession of ories and shouted orders, "Close all doors! the afterhatch is falling in-Come up and surrender-Lass uns heraus!" The Captain rose from the deck beneath the eye-piece, shaky from his fall from the table. He hardly dared look at the gauge, but he kept his head and his wits as he gave his orders. With the motors roaring round at their utmost power and an angle up by the bow of some fifteen degrees, the U-boat held her own, and as tank after tank was blown empty, she slowly gained on the depth gauge and began to climb. As she rose, she was shaken again and again by the powerful depth charges that were being dropped on the broken water left by the airbubble from her after compart

ment- -a surface-mark now a quarter of a mile astern.

Beneath the conning-tower more and more men were gathering, some calm, some white, trembling, and voluble. The boat broke surface with her stem and half her conningtower showing, then levelled a little and tore along with the waves foaming round her conning - tower and bridge. and bridge. From inside they could clearly hear the shells that greeted her, and in a moment there was a rush of men up the ladder. Among the first few the Captain saw his First his First Lieutenant's legs vanish upwards, and at the sight a sneering smile showed on his sunburnt face. The first man to open the lid died as he did so, for a four-inch shell removed the top of the conning-tower before he was clear of it. The escort was taking no chances as to whether the boat's appear ance on the surface was intentional or accidental, and they were making the water for a hundred yards around

her fairly boil with bursting shell. As the boat tore ahead, holding herself up on her angle and her speed, a few men struggled out of her one by one past the torn body of the first man to get out. Two of them leaped instantly overboard, but the next clawed his way up to a rail, and while others scrambled and fought their way overside, and shells crashed and burst below and around him on water and conning-tower casing, he stood upright a moment with arms raised high above his head. At the signal the firing ceased as if a switch had been turned by a single hand, and he subsided in a huddled heap on the bridge as the riddled submarine ran under. Down below the Captain still smiled, leaning with his elbows on the periscope training-handles and watching the hurrying men at the ladder's foot, until the great rush of water and men, that showed that the end had come, swept him aft and away across the border-line of sleep.

KLAXON.

THE Lieutenant who arrested us at Haltern Station was certainly very pleased with himself at our capture. He treated us with great courtesy, and told the soldier who was to take us across to the guard-room to give us double rations of soup, adding, with a significant

smile

"Sie werden sehen, dass wir noch nicht ausgehungert sind trotz der englischen Blokade."

(You will see that we are not yet starving, in spite of the English blockade.)

IV.

The guard - room was a wooden hut on the other side of the railway lines, and was the place where the station sentries lived and slept when they were not on duty. It was clean, and contained, at one end, a long wooden bunk with horse blankets, in which the soldiers slept side by side, three tressel-tables with benches, and a big cast-iron stove, which heated the room so thoroughly that the temperature was quite uncomfortably high. We were given a very good soup, identioal with the soup which was given to our guards, and chatted quite amicably with the German soldiers who came and went during the day. The corporal in charge of the guard was a pedantic boor, and very

different in his attitude towards us from the ordinary soldiers, one or two of whom came very close indeed to expressing sympathy with us in our failure to win through. When we asked whether it was usual, on the actual frontier, to challenge escaping prisoners if they were seen, the corporal growled

"It may be the rule, but if ever I am on duty there, and see any one trying to get over, I shall shoot and shout 'Halt!' afterwards. I have five cartridges in my magazine, and if I miss with the first, I shall not fail to hit with one of the others. I shall take no risks."

Some time after we had eaten our soup, the lieutenant came in, accompanied by a faraway-behind-the-lines official in officer's uniform, who was greeted with respect and almost fear by the soldiers, and addressed as Herr Inspektor. He spoke to us in the usual insolent Prussian fashion, much to the evident embarrassment of the young lieutenant, who had been quite palpably striving to play the gentleman. He demanded, with much bounce and bluster, that we should pay for our food, to which request we made no demur, and he seemed, the

whole time, to be determinedly looking for trouble.

He began to discuss the war in its different aspects, laying the blame, of course, on England and her devilish diplomacy, and showed himself absolutely inaccessible to the arguments we did not hesitate to advance, when we became somewhat nettled by his absurd statement of the case. He left shortly afterwards, and we did not see him again. The corporal, who was bubbling over with unotuous respect for his superior's gay uniform, made a perfect salute on his depar

ture.

We had assumed that we should remain in the guardroom until the transport arrived from Berlin to take us back to prison, but shortly after dark the lieutenant appeared again, and apologised for having to send us to the village lock-up. He had tried hard during the day to elicit from us full information concerning the manner in which we had escaped from prison, and also how we had managed to get to a point so near the frontier, but we told him just as much as we thought was good for him, and no more. The two soldiers who escorted us, with fixed bayonets, from the station through the dark village to the village jail, were good fellows, and did not conceal their appreciation of the fact that we had several times had a run for freedom, and also their sincere regret that they were compelled to play a part in taking us back to bondage. When handing us

over to the jailer inside the village look-up, they passed on to him a recommendation from the lieutenant that we should be treated as considerately as was consistent with keeping us in safe custody. After we had had our pockets searched for weapons, and even our penknives taken away from us we were taken along a short corridor, the cell door was opened, and we were shown in. The jailer—a good-hearted fellow, with the slowest-moving mind I have ever encountered (he appeared to live constantly in a state of semi-coma) -brought us a little food before he locked us up for the night.

The cell did not differ, in any marked degree, from what I suppose is the appearance of most cells of the same kind, except for the fact that it was abominably dirty, and the bed was so lousy that I was kept awake for hours at night by what appeared, to my vivid imagination, to be whole regiments of dauntless vermin. In one corner of the room, underneath the heavily - barred window, was a nine-foot pile of bicycle tyres, which had doubtless been confiscated by the authorities some time before, for the sake of the rubber they contained. The only furniture in the place consisted of a hard bed, with dirty mattress and blankets, & wooden, wedge-shaped pillow, a table, stool, and an abominably insanitary convenience. We spent three days in this cell, our only relief coming when we were