“I see the searchlight plainly enough,” I said, “but where’s the Zepp?” “Take my glass,” said Horne, handing me a small pair of semi-collapsible binoculars which was evidently a constant companion. “Now focus on that point of brighter glow, with a shadow behind it, half-way down the shaft--right there, straight over the back of the right-hand lion at the foot of the Obelisk.” I did as directed, fairly to gasp with astonishment as a tiny blur, so indistinct as to go unnoticed by the passers-by on the Embankment, sharpened to a long, yellow-ribbed pencil, with pin-points of light--fireflies escorting a glow-worm--flashing out and disappearing above and below and round about it. “The first Zepp to get over London in six months,” I ejaculated excitedly. “How long will she take to get here? Hadn’t we better get away from the river and under cover? But no,” I went on, peering through the glass again; “I don’t think she’s coming this way. Seems to be standing still. Probably hovering over W----, the old objective.” “London! W----!” laughed Horne. “Do you realise that _you_ didn’t hear any bombs, and that none of these people have any idea that there’s a raiding Zeppelin, with shells bursting about it, squarely in their range of vision? That fellow’s all of twenty-five miles away, and as for its ‘hovering,’ you may rest assured that when you see a Zepp with incendiary shells bursting _above_ it, it is either badly hit or else doing seventy miles an hour toward the home hangars. As a matter of fact, I’ve been expecting to see this fellow begin to drop at any moment. He’s evidently run into better guns and gunners than he counted on. Ah! No hope!” (Horne snatched his glass and turned it quickly on the now agitated searchlight beam.) “He’s gone. Even the light’s lost him.” Horne turned around disgustedly, led the way to a bench by the curb, pushed along a somnolent “match dame” to make room for him, and wearily sat down. “He’s slippery game--the Zepp,” he observed presently, after watching the futile flounderings of the questing searchlight. “I didn’t tell you, did I, that it was through trying to get a Zepp that I came that last cropper of mine over Belgium?” “You know perfectly well you didn’t,” I replied, folding a corner of the old match-seller’s straggling cloak back over her knees and sitting down in the space vacated. “Go to it.” “I was starting on a reconnaissance over a corner of Belgium just as the Zepp was returning from a raid over France. I got above him, and just after I dropped my first bomb the ‘Archies’ opened up on me from the ground and put me out at just about the first shot. Jolly nervy work, with my machine only a couple of hundred feet above the Zepp. A little too nervy, perhaps, for I’ve never been quite certain in my own mind whether it was my bomb or one from the German guns which sent the Zepp--not wrecked but pretty badly messed up--down into a sugar-beet field. I headed----”