By daybreak the Battery was a black mass of people. They looked eagerly toward the Narrows, but could see nothing but a wall of mist, from which the gray shape of a destroyer now and then emerged. High in the air, however, the plume of steam was visible. It was now more than a thousand feet high and was dense and white. The first rays of the sun had gilded the top, while the ground below was still dim and dark, but now it rose in calm and quietness to an unprecedented height, mystifying the people who looked at it and causing a sudden silence to fall upon them all. A warm, moist sea breeze had blown in from the ocean during the night and had been changed to fog as it passed over the expanse of ice, so that the ice itself was hidden from view, but the tall plume of steam told of some mysterious menace to humanity that the crowd assembled at the Battery feared without understanding. As the mass of people watched the supremely calm column of steam rising high in the air of that August morning, newsboys began to circulate among them, their strident cries sounding strangely among the silent multitude. The Narrows were frozen solidly from shore to shore, and all entrance to and egress from New York harbor was blocked. Small craft could go out behind Staten Island through the Kill van Kull, and some vessels could use the other channel which goes from the East River into the Sound, but the great Ambrose Channel---one-third the size of the Panama Canal--and the broad opening that made New York the greatest port on the Atlantic coast was closed. The growth of the ice cake had greatly lessened, so that it could be predicted that it would not expand far beyond its present size, but its origin and the means by which it resisted the disintegrating effect of the August warmth were utterly unknown. The cause of the plume of steam from the center of the ice cake was an unfathomable mystery. Suddenly, from the empty sky, there came a deep, musical humming. Instinctively people looked up. The humming grew louder and more distinct, while curious eyes swept the sky. Then a black speck appeared below one of the fleecy white clouds and dropped toward the earth. A thousand feet, two thousand feet it fell, then checked and hung steadily in the air. Those who looked with the naked eye could only discern that it seemed like a wingless black splinter suspended above the earth, but those who had glasses saw the whir of dark disks above a black, stream-lined body. A small cabin was placed amidships, and a misshapen globe hung from chains below. It was still for several minutes. The passenger or passengers seemed to be inspecting the earth below, and particularly the ice cake, with deliberation and care. Then it began to rise with the same deliberation and certainty, swung around, and sped off with incredible speed toward the northeast. The humming sound grew fainter and died away, but the crowd standing on the Battery began to murmur with a nameless sense of fear.