the tiny reef-sail and put out the seaanchor. At 8 P.M. we were swamped by a breaking sea and I thought all was over. A moan of despair rose in the darkness, but I shouted to them, 'Bail, bail, bail!' and assured them that the boat could not sink. How they found the bailers and buckets in the dark, I don't know, but they managed to free the boat, while I shifted the sea-anchor to the stern and made a tiny bit of sail and got her away before the wind. After that escape the wind died away about midnight and we spent a most distressing night. Several of the men collapsed, others temporarily lost their reason; and one of these became pugnacious and climbed about the boat uttering complaints and threats.

The horror of that night, together with the physical suffering, are beyond my power of description. Before daylight, however, on March 23, the wind permitting, I managed with the help of the few who remained able, to set sail again, hoping now to be in the Bay of Biscay and to surely see some vessel to succor us. Never a sail or wisp of smoke had we seen. When daylight came, the appeals for water were so angry and insistent that I deemed it best to make an issue at once. After that had gone round amid much cursing and snatching, we could see that only one more issue remained. One fireman, Thomas, was dead; another was nearly gone; my steward, Buckley, was almost gone; we tried to pour some milk and water down his throat, but he could not swallow. No one could eat biscuits; it was impossible to swallow anything solid; our throats were afire, our lips furred, our limbs numbed, hands were white and bloodless. During the forenoon Friday, another fireman, named Tribe, died, and my steward Buckley died; also a cattleman, whose only name I could get as Peter, collapsed and died about noon.

Our

To our unspeakable relief we were rescued about 1:30 P.M. on Friday, 23, by the French steamer Venezia of the Fabre Line, for New York for horses. A considerable swell was running, and in our enfeebled state we were unable properly to manœuvre our boat; but the French captain, M. Paul Bonifacie, handled his empty vessel with great skill and brought her alongside us, sending out a lifebuoy on a line for us to seize. We were unable to climb the ladders, so they hoisted us one by one in ropes, until the 24 live men were aboard.

The four dead bodies were left in the boat, and the gunners of the Venezia fired at her in order to destroy her, but the shots did not take effect.

I earnestly hope that the other five boats have been picked up, for I fear that neither of the small accident boats had much chance of surviving the weather I experienced. At present I have not regained fully the use of my hands and feet, but hope to be fit again before my arrival in England, when I trust you will honor me with appointment to another ship.

I am, gentlemen, your obedient servant,

BENJ. CHAVE.

To collect these little stories of the sea has required a deal of perseverance. For these men will talk to you about the excellent work of the American destroyers in the war zone, about what some other skipper has done; but never will you learn from the lips of a British merchant-ship officer of his own gallant deeds, of the stout heart he has shown in saving his ship and the lives of men, women, and children imperiled by the Teuton murderers. There have been no conscientious objectors among them. They have done what it has been necessary for them to do, facing death daily and hourly.

no idea that any one is watching him,' thought the mother, astutely; and from this point of vantage, therefore, she watched. She saw Edwin get up and of his own free will speak to a middleaged lady a few rows in front of him. The lady seemed well acquainted with him, and he sat down beside her and .conversed with perfect ease and cordiality. His mother watched him, agape. She had chronically worried about his manners when she was not present to remind and prompt him, as she had done since he was six years old; to whisper, 'Don't forget to be very polite to Mrs. S.' If she had only known, it was this very admonition that made his manner toward Mrs. S positively adamantine in its ab

After the curtain went down, as Mrs. Byrne was getting into her carriage, she saw her son helping the other lady into hers. The girl's smart dress came only to the top of her boots, and her hair was tied up in two great childish bows. She was talking in the same affectedly grown-up manner. 'Why, she's not such a child after all,' thought the mother; 'she might be fifteen!' It had not occurred to her before that a girl who reached only to her tall son's shoulder could be his contemporary. She tried to signal from her carriage, but the boy had disappeared. On her way home she stopped at a friend's house for tea, and burst out about her

fully common Mrs. Gilbert's daughter. I recognized them at the play; is n't it too delicious!'

And her hostess, Mrs. Betts, an invalid, who took an eager interest in all young people's affairs, laughed, and said archly,

'He's such a dear, handsome boy! I suppose he will have a hundred affairs before he's through; but the first is always so amusing!'

When Mrs. Byrne came home she found Edwin, again in his old Norfolk coat, his hair rumpled, sitting in the back drawing-room, reading the newspaper, his feet on the damask sofa.

'I saw you at the opera this afternoon, but you did n't see me,' she said archly, frowning at his muddy shoes.

He gave her a startled, terrible look.

'Who was the nice-looking lady and the pretty girl you were talking to? Was it Mrs. Thomas Gilbert?' continued his mother pleasantly, trying to account for the horror in the boy's eyes.

'What girl? I don't know. Guess her name's Gilbert. Met 'em somewhere. Don't know 'em at all,' stammered Edwin.

'Mrs. Thomas Gilbert,' continued the mother cordially; ' I never met her, but I know who she is.' Silence.

'Don't they live on Albert Square?' Mrs. Byrne pursued. 'Did n't the father make his money in bath-tubs?'

'Guess so. Don't know anything about 'em,' almost shouted Edwin. 'Why, I dare say they are nice enough people.'

son.

'Would n't you like to ask that little girl here, or go to the theatre?'

But this natural suggestion was met by a look of such positive hatred and agony that she was really frightened and hastened to change the subject.

'What do you think of the news?' she asked, reading over Edwin's shoulder the staring headlines of his paper: 'Austria's ultimatum to Servia? Every one was talking about it where I went for tea.'

'It looks like a mix-up,' said Edwin, enormously relieved by the change of subject.

'Not war!' murmured his mother, and scolded him for putting his muddy shoes on the damask sofa. Her thought of the mix-up was, 'Nothing will come of this,' meaning, 'Nothing that will remotely affect Edwin or me personally.'

Other mothers, reading the headlines that same evening in quiet homes throughout Canada, were asking the same thing: 'Will this affect us?' 'Not war,' was their startled opinion; and while with Mrs. Byrne they voiced the general conviction and waited with the almost pleasurable horror and awe which perverse human nature experiences on the brink of a cataclysm, within the week their homes across the sea felt and were stirred by the strange vibration that arose, swaying, gaining in impetus, as on the highways, under the windows of Germany, the mightiest army in the world marched by.

But when, in its time, came the invasion of Belgium and the declaration of war by Great Britain, then instantly the panicky thought of mothers throughout Britain's great dominion was, 'Who is to fight this war?'

"Thank Heaven, Edwin is only seventeen!' thought one Canadian mother to herself.

Edwin, in those first days of war, was thrilled out of his usual silence,

and his voice became hoarse with excitement. It rang through the house, and his leaping footsteps shook the stairs whenever a newsboy was heard at the street-corner. It was he who came bursting in to give the first news, calling,

'Mother! Mother!'

'I'm here,' she called back. She was sewing in her room.

'Canada calls for volunteers, mother; see, for volunteers.' He held a newspaper in his hand.

'Oh!' she said. At that moment all over the country women were saying, 'Oh!' The cry was echoed in the pantry, and in the nursery, and across the vast plains from the ranchmen's homes. Down the street a newsboy went shouting,

'Canada calls for volunteers for the mother country!'

'Hear that!' said Edwin.

He threw his arms round his mother's neck and hugged her with all his brutal young strength. His face was aglow as if with rapture.

Mrs. Byrne, looking up at him, was listening.

"Thank goodness, he's only seventeen!' she comforted herself. "They surely won't take boys as young as he.'

She kept saying it in Edwin's hearing.

'Oh, I think mothers are so brave nowadays; they don't think of themselves at all. I don't know how I'd bear it; but I am so lucky, for they can't want boys as young as seventeen!'

Silently she reckoned up the young men she knew, whose death would be a personal loss to her or her friends, and she sighed with relief. She had none to give.

Five weeks later - just four months before Edwin's eighteenth birthday he came into the room where his mother was waiting for tea. He kicked the wood-fire for five minutes, whistled, spilled the matches, swore under

his breath, and kicked them into the ashes.

'I've enlisted,' he said.

He looked guilty and ashamed, and he kicked the matches steadily and uneasily, his eyes bent on the floor.

His mother continued fussing with the tea-cups. Presently she said, 'I expected it. Her hand did not tremble, but for some reason she blushed like a young girl.

Instead of shopping and doing errands that afternoon, as she usually did, she walked. She walked in an unaccustomed part of the town. She went into a little park an island of dusty green among shabby old houses-and sat down. The sun was very hot, in the later afternoon, slanting through the trees and zigzagging dazzling patterns on the walks and iron benches. She had forgotten her parasol, but she did not take the trouble to move into the shade. She sat motionless; her face was flushed from the heat, and its refined and delicate lines sagged with weariness, showing the innocent sadness and quiet pathos that we see sometimes on the faces of middle-aged, quite conventional women, when they are asleep or quite alone and off-guard, or after they are dead and laid out in their caskets.

In the distance a hurdy-gurdy was playing war-tunes. People passed to and fro on the gravel walks. The air was sweet and drowsy, with the chirping of sparrows and the high, sweet voices of children and the incessant purring and calling of the city.

There were three figures which sat silently on the benches that hazy October afternoon. A heavy, sodden woman in the corner, who was talking to herself and crying in a luxurious drunken stupor, dizzy and lulled from her misery; a young fellow with a consumptive's cough, who was reading a stray page of a newspaper which the wind had been blowing about for days

in the dirt; and the lady in lilac and black, sitting in the full glare of the sun, without a parasol.

A boy and a girl walked by and saw nothing. The boy was tall and slender; the girl reached only to his shoulder; but she was doing all the talking, in a shrill, very young voice, with a little grown-up emphasis, and she twisted her hands nervously and excitedly as she talked.

The mother watched them; she watched Edwin every time the piquant, sharp face, the soft mouth with its incessant flow of words, was turned upward in his direction. Impossible not to follow the expression in Edward's eyes as he looked down at the top of her head, with its big bows bobbing. They walked side by side in the checkered sunlight, and the birds chirped, and the children called in their high, sweet voices, and the Vesper bells tolled the hour.

The mother stared after the retreating figures. She was aware of a sense of consternation. Her eyes clung to Edwin's slight figure disappearing under the trees beside that of the girl. It brought a choking feeling into her throat, and she was reminded quite suddenly that she had had Edwin in this very spot sixteen years ago, being wheeled in his perambulator-a big, handsome, placid baby. She remembered how she had smiled to herself at the majestic and austere gait of the

nurse

-'Just as if,' she had thought indulgently, 'she were pushing royalty!' The sun was very hot; she felt withered and close to tears. She got up abruptly and walked away.

The intoxicated woman watched her, grunting and murmuring to herself. The girl and boy came walking back slowly and sat down on the bench the lady had vacated.

'I like you best of anybody I know,' he said.