The Japanese officers made me very heartily welcome to their hut, on a shelf in which I noticed immediately on my entry a little statue of Buddha. While I sketched some of these placid, not readily fathomable faces, I heard, in broken English, the tragic story of the broken life of their Captain, the Commander of the _Hitachi Maru_. The Captain had intended suicide from the time he lost his vessel--thirteen of her crew were killed in the fight--and simply awaited his opportunity. This came to him in the darkness and amid the floes of Iceland, when the _Wolf_, with fangs red with blood, was running back for Kiel. Engineer Lieut.-Commander K. Shiraishi, of the Imperial Japanese Navy, is speaking, his immobile face--so that I may complete my sketch--as rigid as that of the little Buddha which I can see behind him. He has shared a berth with the Captain, and tells me that on the night of his disappearance he left the cabin, “and he come not back.” He had slipped quietly overboard--“in the dark and among the ice”--thus embarking on a final voyage, new and strange. “All night we hear the ice grinding past the ship,” said my Lieut.-Commander, without the flicker of an eyelid. “In the dark--and among the ice!” Returning to my hut, by a literary coincidence not uncommon, I opened Joseph Conrad, and read in “Il Conde”: “He put the tip of his finger on a spot close under his breast-bone, the very spot of the human body where a Japanese gentleman begins the operation of the Harakiri, which is a form of suicide following upon dishonour, upon an intolerable outrage to the delicacy of one’s feelings.” Captain Meadows, of the _Tarantella_, the first steamer sunk by the _Wolf_, was a man of Herculean build, and quite apparently, and as befitted the skipper of a ship named as his was, he had led the German Commander something of a dance. Every morning, until he was caught in the act, the Captain used to empty the water from his bath into the sea, and with it a bottle giving the bearings of the _Wolf_, and some account of her depredations. Even when the time came that two or three German sailors flung themselves suddenly upon him, he succeeded in “mailing his letter,” and when he received a vehement reprimand he made retort that if the Commander thought it necessary to shout even louder he might use his megaphone! [Illustration: CAPTAIN OF THE “TARANTELLA.”] The _Wolf_ apparently employed a hydroplane with great effect in locating her prey, and in evading capture. The Captain of the _Matunga_ showed me a snapshot--from which I made a sketch--of the last moments of his sinking ship. CLINGING TO OFFICE