Daily, in earliest dusk of dawn, the wakeful might watch the faring forth
of a weirdly assorted fleet of small craft, the day patrol, to relieve a
night patrol as weirdly heterogeneous. Daily, at all hours, mine-sweepers
came and went, by twos and twos, in flocks, in schools; and daily bellowing
offshore detonations advertised their success in garnering those horned
black seeds of death which the Hun and his kin were sedulous to sow in the
fairways. While daily battleships both great and small rolled in wearily to
refit and dress their wounds, or took swift departure on grim and secret
errands.

There was, moreover, the not-infrequent spectacle of some minor ship of
war--a truculent, gray destroyer as like as not--shepherding in a sleek
submarine, like a felon whale armoured and strangely caparisoned in
gray-brown steel, to be moored in chains with a considerable company of its
fellows on the far side of the roadstead, while its crew was taken ashore
and consigned to some dark limbo of oblivion.

And once, with a light cruiser snapping at her heels, a drab Norwegian
tramp plodded sullenly into port, a mine-layer caught red-handed, plying
its assassin's trade beneath a neutral flag.

Not long after its crew had been landed, volleys of musketry crashed in the
town gaol-yard.

One of a group of three idling on the promenade deck of the _Assyrian_,
Lanyard turned sharply and stared through narrowed eyelids into the quarter
whence the sounds reverberated.

The man at his side, a loose-jointed American of the commercial caste,