For a quarter of an hour there was nothing to be seen but a great mass of smoke, which grew sometimes fainter and sometimes stronger. For a while it looked as if it was produced by several funnels. To make sure, I sent my first officer up to the fore-top with an excellent Zeiss glass. A few seconds later he reported a high mast with spotting-top--the funnels were not yet to be made out. A warship, then. The plot began to thicken. I gave the orders, 'Emergency stations. Course NE., Engine-room staff to reduce smoke.' A course to the east of NE. was, for the present, not advisable, for it was quite possible that there might be other warships in that direction, and it was not yet possible to make out which way the cruiser was heading. The 'smokeless' stunt we now tried for the first time, and it went much better than we expected. This was the more creditable, because tramp-steamers have no special arrangements for smokeless firing, and the men, who were mostly reservists, had not been trained to it. The moments that now followed were certainly the most anxious we had yet experienced. The cruiser seemed to be steaming towards us at full speed, for the mast, with its high wireless, could now be seen from our bridge as well as from aloft. 'A second lower mast now visible,' reported the look-out. As he described the relative position of the masts it became evident that the Englishman was heading about north-east. Had he really seen us yet, or not? I gave her four points more to starboard, so that we were now on an easterly course. Perhaps we might still escape. The great difference in the height of the masts left no doubt that we had here to do with one of the very newest and fastest English cruisers. If she had sighted us, any attempt at flight was useless. But we counted on the English look-out not being as sharp as ours. It is natural that on monotonous outpost duty, cruising to and fro day after day in the same waters and hardly ever seeing anything but the same sea and sky, sky and sea, one's watchfulness should in the end get blunted. And that was just what happened. A joyful shout from aloft suddenly announced that the cruiser was turning away. As we examined her more closely we could, in fact, see that the high fore-mast, which had originally been visible to the east of the lower mast, now showed to the north-west of it. Evidently the cruiser had turned on to a westerly course, and that meant that she had not sighted us. A short time later, nothing was to be seen of either mast, and soon only a pair of light wisps of smoke lay on the misty horizon. The whole thing had happened so swiftly and surprisingly that we could hardly believe in our good fortune.