In the darkness the silver light from the screen vaguely illumined the tense crowding figures. The highest officials of our government! No calm judicial conference here! Tired, cold, anxious men, watching and listening with bated breaths and thumping hearts. There had been a buzz of whispered comments; the shifting of chairs; shuffling of feet. But now there was silence. The screen image blurred for a moment as it was brought in from the other room; but soon it cleared. I saw the cold, frosty stars in a field of blue-black; far below, the dim vista of gray-white snow shining in the starlight--a panorama of snow-laden country at night. The image-finder was in the front of Davis's plane, pointing diagonally downward. A swaying scene, diminished by the mirror, and by the two thousand-foot altitude at which Davis was flying. Some one said: "Where are we? I don't recognize that landscape." "Long Island. He's heading for New York City. Hush! We'll throw in his radio-sound." It was the voice of the War Secretary. "Grant, you said you had connection." A man was fumbling with the miniature audiphone beside the mirror. We heard the drone of Davis's plane; and then heard his voice, with words indistinguishable as he spoke to the gunner with him. The President's voice said nervously: "Have you sending connection? If we want to give him orders--where is the other plane? Isn't Robinson around here?" Grant said: "Yes. He was visible awhile ago. Davis is going to fly over New York--the enemy, he thinks, is still up in the Yonkers district." * * * * * I sat staring at the screen. Half an hour? Or two hours? I could not have said. Swaying stars; a dim white swaying landscape. Then the horizon dropped; stars covered everything; Davis was mounting. He leveled at last. Dimly, far down, I could see the white configurations of Long Island Sound, frozen into solid ice, white with piled snowdrifts, black where the wind had swept it bare. A blurred, shifting scene, dizzying, but sometimes steady and very clear. It tilted up--all land for a moment. I saw, momentarily as the plane swooped down, the great bridges over the river from Long Island to Manhattan. Small as a child's toys. Broken toy bridges, with ice piled upon them; cables dangling--the older Brooklyn Bridge lay askew. A jam of river ice had wrenched at one of its piers. It was a motionless world; the river of tangled, motionless ice-floes, the frozen, motionless bay with hulks of vessels caught in it and abandoned; and the great city--all congealed, stricken of motion in every detail.