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Show -4 lkmjiies Bij a Lieutenant in the x United. Stales Nauu MOTOR FAULTS A WIFE? She isn't In it not with n man and his machine. The divine di-vine harmony of married bliss, the gentle concord of lifelong companionship, companion-ship, the passionate prelude to life Itself, are as dust before the hypnotic bonds of mechanism. Observe the chief electrician on watch. About him hum and roar and thump and purr the million parts of n monster man-of-war. Overhead may flash great teams of heavy guns and hurl their steel death Into the enemy. Men may be dying up there. Or a twelve-ton broadside may this moment be- in flight toward the heart of the dynamo room Itself. He is watching his motor. Four fat turbo generators are sucking 'Juice' out of the air or wherever juice comes from and feeding it through the ship. Tart of it feeds the spinning motor. And an invisible man-magnetism in the process has seized the chief and drawn quintessence of interest from his mind and body. Suddenly electric lamps about grow brighter. Gather pleasant, one would think, to have more light. Not so the chief. To him one bit of unusual brilliancy bril-liancy means turbine speed too high. Too much current Is squirting through the cupric nerve of his paramour. With a practised hand he shifts n valve. Steam drops the fraction of a pound and lamps come natural again. Eyes bright from concentration shift to the ammeter, a dial that shows the current. Its .feathered needle moves with the motor's pulse, a pulse of blood more strange than space, twice as invisible, yet potent beyond man's puny measurements. Voltmeter gives him the pressure of this blood. Crackle of tiny sparks here and there point to many leaks In the tender skin of Insulation. Perhaps a slight fever warms the sturdy mac- nets at the motor's forehead an overload over-load or short In the circuit would do it. So the chief does this and that with his switches, and his armature brushes, and his resisting rheostat, until un-til his loved one rests more easily. Mayhap a burst of blinding flame stuns him. He may flinch in the heat of It. Five-hundred volts lenp short gaps with almost volcanic intensity. But the chief leaps to his circuit breaker with a ferocity of defense. His own body is nothing. 'Tls the motor he would save. No misogynist Is this not with a love like that! Bachelor at forty; call him a celibate if you please. But the motor's faults are not the follies of a woman. They are the weak points In the chief's electrical efficiency. Ee knows this. The clean truth of it holds him. He sticks to the navy, to his motor; and his love- Is very genuine. SUBMARINE BELL THERE Is a certain warship skipper skip-per who calls attention to the spreading gray about his temples. Not that he is proud of this mark of age, but because it runs no further than his ears. "My gray hairs stop," he explains, ex-plains, "because I always know just when to stop worrying." His friends, however, "have one on him." 'Twas the submarine bell that got the placid skipper's goat. ' This gadget as we say in the nr.vy, meaning thingumbob is a device for transmitting sound signals under water. wa-ter. Large lightships such as Nantucket Nan-tucket have a heavy bell suspended deep in the water. By an automatic device a clapper strikes, at regular intervals. in-tervals. Each bell along the coast has its characteristic interval and number of strokes. All large ships and men-of-war are fitted with receivers for capturing the sound waves set up under water by these bells. In the outer bottom Is a small box filled with water and containing con-taining a very sensitive diaphragm which vibrates in tune with the bell. Through telephonic connection one may catch' the signals from the bridge or any other part of the ship. Since the receivers are on each side sound comes most distinctly when the bell is nearly on the beam. From four to five miles is the average limit of ri.nge. One thick March morning our self-contained self-contained friend was approaching New York. Though he was well off-shore : the soupy fog made him anxious about j his landfall. Putting his submarine telephone to his ear he suddenly heard the clear note of n bell. "That's queer." I he exclaimed. "We oughn't to he anywhere any-where near the lightship yet." ! He swung the battleship about in order to find which heading blotted out the sound. In this way he could obtain nn approximate bearing of the lightship. But the hell kept on. It played reg- ! ular chimes, increasing and decreas- t ing. To the consternatiou of the skipper skip-per be was unable to determine either ; j the distance, direction, or character of j ; the crazy thing. "Can It he some new : kind of enemy iufernal machine?" he ! wondered. ! He became frantic. He cursed the navigator, the lightship, the oflicer-of-the-deck ; and then all ships and hells ': nud officers. In a final paroxysm of j anxiety lie sent someone to investigate his receiving box In the double bottoms. bot-toms. Which disclosed a single happy whistling 'busy bluejacket, chipping pnint. And every time the sailor struck the bulkhead his signal carried direct to the perplexed bridge gang. So even the skipper had his oft day. SEA OUTFIT IN MOMENTS of great stress we are very human ; also genuine. We tend to reveal that which Is most characteristic character-istic of our whole makeup. Take the case of a certain commander comman-der who received orders at sen. Such a change means little to the bluejacket. bluejack-et. He is younger and more temporary tempo-rary In the service. When Uncle Sam lobs him from beach to battlehoat. "I Should Worry" is the tune to which he marches. For the "gob'4 lucky dog-takes dog-takes a turn round ditty box and hag with hummock furled beside, and beats It. But a commander doesn't swing In a hammock; and a dozen ditty boxes and bags wouldn't hold the mess of uniforms he must have. Also there nre his civilian togs, and swords, and books, and filing cases, and a multitude multi-tude of other belongings. Yet he has cut to bare necessities. "No, my dear," to his tearful wife says he, "I cannot take those sofa pillows pil-lows for my bunk. But I need the sheets and pillowcases. Four blankets will be more than enough. And don't forget the towels and a sewing kit." She doesn't. Nor does she overlook his winter underwear and sweaters for a sudden northern cruise. When he isn't watching she darns up all his socks and his whites. Knowing his nbsentmlndedness she tucks In odd corners of his sen chest small packages pack-ages of pins and pipes and spare shav-inir shav-inir irenr and shoestrings and mittens and mufflers and woolen socks, and an old pnnnmn hat for Cuban wnters. She Insists on Including an alcohol stove for a midnight mug up on the gnle-cut bridge. She gets ready his sen diary and has his binoculars cleaned. She finds has epaulettes need new strnps and puts In n mean half-hour splicing up his sword knot. Finally. If she's wise, she sends In a subscription for her commander's favorite magazine and arranges to have fresh ffuit sent him when In port. As a last touch with hags and boxes packed and ready she slips In a little picture of herself. "He'll probably miss it when he gets there," she murmurs. mur-murs. Months later he's home ngaln, and he talks a bit. "Oh yes." says he offhandedly, off-handedly, "just as the old tub was about to break up I slipped Into my room and got your picture." Whereupon he hauls out and hands her the most important Item of a commander's com-mander's sen outfit. I MACHINERY INSPECTOR AN EXPLORER will return to the drear loneliness of the wilderness. wilder-ness. A convict free will find himself strangely longing for the bitterness of captivity. So strong is the hold environment en-vironment can take on the soul of a man. On a ship in the fleet served a good seagoing chief engineer. But he had been at sea too long. He was growing stale. So he asked for shore duty. He was transferred to a huge steel mill where government com rafts were filled. For two years he was to hear the bum of lathe and scraper instead of the pound and the wheeze of his own engines. Instead of the intermittent intermit-tent roar of the turreted guns he was to.be half-deafened by the more steady belching of gigantic blast furnaces. His title was Naval Inspector of Machinery. Ma-chinery. A superdrendnaught was launched. The inspector supervised the installation installa-tion of her mighty engines. His responsibility re-sponsibility increased up to the day of her trials. On this day a hoard of inspection and survey came down In full regalia to hold official tests of the new war baby. The Inspector met the big hugs in proper form, but he didn't look happy. Perhaps It was the sheaf of papers and records he produced that lill-ed him full of gloom. For instance there were the weight tables for parts and fittings and auxiliaries and full boilers as well as empty ones; it may have been his long monotonous report comparing the finished product to the original specifications. speci-fications. The machinery inspector was gray j and weary. Facts and figures had be- j gun to get 011 his nerves. Indoor work j had stolen his tan. And when he j guided the trial hoard through their duties In trying out the newest of our ; men-of-war lie realized he'd had i enough shore duty. "Guess I'll put In ! for' the fleet again." he declared. "I I don't seem to do so well here." i He was wrong. Few inspectors before be-fore him had been his equal. The truth was the old, old truth : He was homesick home-sick for the heave of a plated deck, the swish of oily bilges, and a salt breath out of the starboard hatch. I So "slave of the sea" is the right name after all. 1 |