At the table we did not waste much time on etiquette. To wash your face for breakfast during a gale was considered a decided economic disutility, and we didn’t care what place we occupied just so we got a mouthful of grub. But one thing was always insisted on, and that was for a man to remove his headgear at meals. It didn’t make any difference whether a fellow had any pants on or not, but he must not presume to wear a white hat or a watch-cap. All hands would howl him out of the compartment.
The foregoing fragment of a deep-sea idyll is included in a war story of the Reid destroyer as deftly compiled by George M. Beatty, Jr., one of that dashing crew, and published with the title, “Seventy Thousand Miles on a Submarine Destroyer.” This young man was heartless enough to print in the volume a ballad of his own devising which had such things as these to say of the author of this chronicle of the Corsair:
“Grim Father Neptune has his throne
In the Bay of Biscay, all alone,
And on the day of which we speak,
He served out weather rough and bleak;
He sent us hail and he sent us rain,
And ’twas not long ere Ralph D. Paine
Did hie himself to the skipper’s bunk
And swear the writing game was punk.”