"There’s a compass in the boat, sir." The Coxswain moved forward again to the wheel, wearing a slightly ruffled expression which, owing to the darkness and the fact that there was no one to see it, was rather wasted. For thirty years he’d known that harbour, man and boy, fair or foul, and his father a waterman before him.... He jerked the telegraph bell twice, gave a half-contemptuous turn to the wheel, and spat overside. "Compass!" he observed to the night. The boat slid away on its mission, and the shore lights glimmered wan and vanished in the fog astern. A clock ashore struck the hour, and from all sides came the answering ships’ bells—some near, some far, all muffled by the moisture in the heavy atmosphere. Ding-ding! Ding! Half-past one. He who had borne the lantern deposited it in the tiny cabin aft, and with a thoughtful expression removed a frayed halfpenny paper from the inside of the breast of his jumper. To carry simultaneously a cutlass and a comic paper did not apparently accord with his views on the fitness of things, for he carefully refolded the latter and placed it under the cushions of the locker. Then he unhooked a small megaphone from the bulkhead, and came out, closing the sliding-door behind him. Finally he passed forward into the bows of the boat, where he remained visible in the glare of the steaming light, his arms crossed on his chest, hands tucked for warmth one under each arm-pit, peering stolidly into the blackness ahead. Once in mid-stream the fog lessened. Sickly patches of light waxed out of indistinctness and gleamed yellow. Anon as they brightened, a human voice, thin and lonely as a wraith’s, came abruptly out of the night. "Boat ahoy!" The voice from nowhere sounded like an alarm. It was as if the darkness were suddenly suspicious of this swiftly-moving, palpitating thing from across the water. The figure in the bows removed his hands from his arm-pits, picked up the megaphone, and sent a reassuring bellow in the direction of the hail. "Guard Boat!" he answered, and as he did so a vast towering shape had loomed up over them. "Answer’s, ’Guard Boat!’ sir," said the faint voice somewhere above their heads, addressing an unseen third person. A dark wall appeared, surmounted by a shadowy superstructure and a giant tripod mast that was swallowed, long before the eye could reach its apex, in vapour and darkness. The sleek flanks of guns at rest showed for an instant.... A sleeping "Super-Dreadnought." It faded into the darkness astern; then nothing but the mist again, and the throb of the boat’s engines.