It was about seven o'clock in the evening. The harvest moon had long since risen in the eastern sky, and was flooding the pallid sea with its glorious radiance. On the western horizon the broad, bright beacon of Flamborough Head was sending out its bright ray of yellow light over the trembling water. With a night glass, clusters of people could be seen upon the shore and upon the ships anchored under the guns of Scarborough Castle, towering grim and black against the horizon. Ahead was the white Serapis, calmly confident, lying broadside on, port shutters triced up, lights streaming from every opening. She lay with her topsails to the mast, gallantly waiting. Upon her, too, like preparations for combat had been made. Along her decks the same beating call to battle had rolled. Men who spake the same language, who read the same Bible, who but a few years since had loved the same flag, who had vied with each other in loyalty to a common king, now made ready to hurl death and destruction at each other. Presently sharp words of command rang out; there was a sudden bustle on the deck of the English ship. The braces were manned, the yards swung, and the Serapis slowly gathered way and gently forged ahead. Then all was still once more on the serene English ship. As the Richard drew nearer to the Serapis a deep silence settled over the American ship. Even over the roughest and rudest among her crew crept a feeling of awe at the terrible possibilities of the next few moments. The magnitude of their task as they came nearer became more apparent. Forced laughter died away; coarse words remained unspoken; lips foreign to prayer formed words of belated and broken petition. Thoughts went back to home: to sunny fields and vine-clad cottages in France; to frontier huts in verdant clearings in America; to rude houses in seaboard towns where the surf of the western ocean broke in wild thunder upon the rocky shore. Pictures of wives, of children, of mothers, of sweethearts, rose before the misted vision. Here and there a younger man choked down a sob. The rude jests with which men sometimes strive to disguise emotion fell unnoticed, or were sternly reprehended by the older and more thoughtful. The fitful conversation died away, and the silence was broken only by the soft sigh of the wind through the top hamper, the gentle flap of the lighter sails as the pitch of the ship threw the canvas back and forth, the soft splash of the bluff bows through the water, the straining of the timbers, the creak of the cordage through the blocks. Candle-filled battle lanterns in long rows throughout the ship shed a dim radiance over the bodies of the stalwart, half-naked, barefooted men. Here and there a brighter flash told of moonlight reflected from some gleaming sword.