'A beautiful thing,' says he, as the silver-coloured devil flops from the tube and tears away towards the mark. . . . 'Well, I'm blowed.' The torpedo has sheered away to the left, and now is poisoning the air with its garlic-scented Holmes light, fifty yards from the target.
'What did I tell you?' says some one sotto voce. 'We could have got in a dozen shots from the four inch while you were touching off that boomerang.'
'They'd hang you on the ——— if you laughed at torpedoes.'
'I wouldn't if ours were submerged, but with these deck-tubes one never knows how they'll take the water. That thing must have canted as it fell.'
The Gunner looks grieved to the quick, but is presently consoled by a few score pounds of gun-cotton, and goes off with grapnels and batteries to practise 'sweeping' and 'creeping' at the mouth of the bay with a few score other boats. They mine and countermine expeditiously in the Channel Fleet. The process is a technical one, and need not be described here, for there is no necessity to make public either the area covered with mines or the time that it took to lay them. The Gunner returned with a detailed account and some fish that had been stunned by concussion.
'It was a nice little show,' he said. 'A very nice little show. Did you happen to see our smoke?'
I had seen one end of Bantry Bay ripped up from its foundations, but did not inquire further.
