One feature of that autumn was the unwonted magnificence of the displays of the aurora borealis. I never saw such fine auroras before or since. Night after night the sky was lighted up by the brilliantly coloured shafts of quivering flame. It is hardly surprising that the vulgar should have associated the phenomenon with the wonderful tragedy which was being enacted so near to our shores. The most ignorant, however, did not regard it as an omen. They honestly believed that they saw in the heavens the reflection of the glare from burning Paris. I did not settle down to my editorial work in Leeds easily. Everything drew me back to London, and I told the proprietors of the _Mercury_ that I did not mean to retain my post after the war came to an end. But at this point a fresh piece of good fortune came to me, though it arose out of a deplorable calamity. The _Captain_, the experimental vessel built by Captain Cowper Coles on designs that many high naval authorities had declared to be dangerously unsound, capsized in the Bay of Biscay, and sank with nearly every soul on board, including her designer, Captain Coles himself. There had been a great newspaper discussion about the _Captain_, and the _Times_ had taken a vigorous part in it against the Admiralty authorities and in favour of Captain Coles. On the morning on which the news of the disaster was announced, the _Times_ in its leading article maintained that the catastrophe was in no sense due to the instability of the ship, and urged that another _Captain_ should be forthwith built. The _Leeds Mercury_, on the other hand, took what I regarded as the commonsense view, and insisted that for the future the opinions of the trained experts of the Admiralty should be preferred to those of irresponsible enthusiasts, even though they happened to be, like Captain Cowper Coles, men of genius.