At last the captain, hopeless of its clearing up, gave orders to pipe to dinner; but as the weather, in all respects except this abominable haze, was quite fine, and the ship was still in deep water, he directed her to be steered towards the shore, and the lead kept constantly going. As one o’clock approached, he began to feel uneasy, from the water shoaling, and the light-house guns sounding closer and closer; but, being unwilling to disturb the men at their dinner, he resolved to stand on for the remaining ten minutes of the hour. Lo and behold! however, they had not sailed half a mile further before the flying-jib-boom end emerged from the wall of mist—then the bowsprit shot into daylight—and, lastly, the ship herself glided out of the cloud into the full blaze of a bright and ‘sunshine holyday.’ All hands were instantly turned up to make sail; and the men, as they flew on deck, could scarcely believe their senses when they saw behind them the fog bank, right ahead the harbour’s mouth, with the bold cliffs of Cape Sambro on the left, and, farther still, the ships at their moorings, with their ensigns and pendants blowing out, light and dry in the breeze. A far different fate, alas! attended His Majesty’s ship Atalante, Captain Frederick Hickey. On the morning of the 10th of November, 1813, this ship stood in for Halifax harbour in very thick weather, carefully feeling her way with the lead, and having look-out men at the jib-boom end, fore-yardarms, and every where else from which a glimpse of the land was likely to be obtained. After breakfast, a fog signal-gun was fired, in the expectation of its being answered by the light-house on Cape Sambro, near which it was known they must be. Within a few minutes, accordingly, a gun was heard in the N.N.W. quarter, exactly where the light was supposed to lie. As the soundings agreed with the estimated position of the ship, and as the guns from the Atalante, fired at intervals of fifteen minutes, were regularly answered in the direction of the harbour’s mouth, it was determined to stand on, so as to enter the port under the guidance of these sounds alone. By a fatal coincidence of circumstances, however, these answering guns were fired, not by Cape Sambro, but by His Majesty’s ship Barrossa, which was likewise entangled by the fog. She, too, supposed that she was communicating with the light-house, whereas it was the guns of the unfortunate Atalante that she heard all the time.