financial difficulties; that way being to secretly accept the gift of a small trawler, on condition that, any time his services were required by a strange gentleman who would come down from London and bring him instructions, he would faithfully carry them out.

In the middle of the month of August 1914 the mysterious gentleman had arrived, showed him a marked chart of the sea beyond the five-fathoms line at the Sand Haile, and had given him certain instructions, which he had been forced to carry out.

Not without great difficulty had the second shore-end of the cable been brought ashore at night just opposite his cottage, and dug into the sand at low water, the end being afterwards carried into the little bedroom in the cottage, where, a few days before, several heavy boxes had arrived--boxes which old Tom afterwards saw contained a quantity of electric batteries and weird-looking apparatus.

It was then that Lewin Rodwell arrived for the first time, and, among other accomplishments, being a trained telegraph electrician, he had set the instruments up upon the unsuspicious-looking stand of the big old sewing-machine.

Small, who daily realized and regretted the crafty machinations of the enemy in entrapping him by means of the moneylender in Hull, was inclined to go to the police, confess, and expose the whole affair.

Rodwell, with his shrewd intuition, knew this, and in consequence treated father and son with very little consideration.

Even as he stood in the room that night fingering the secret instruments, which he had just revealed by lifting the cover, he turned to the weatherbeaten old man and said, in a hard, sarcastic voice:

"You see the war is lasting longer than you expected, Small--isn't it? I suppose you've seen all that silly nonsense in the papers about Germany being already at the end of her tether? Don't you believe it. In a year's time we shall have only just started."

"Yes, sir," replied the old fellow, in a thick voice. "But--well, sir, I--I tell you frankly, I'm growing a bit nervous. Mr Judd, from the Chapel Point coastguard, came 'ere twice last week and sat with me smokin', as if he were a-tryin' to pump me."

"Nervous, be hanged, Small. Don't be an idiot!" Rodwell replied quickly. "What can anybody know, unless you yourself blab? And if you did--by Gad! your own people would shoot you as a traitor at the Tower 

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