Save for the visibility, which was diamond-clear in the slanting light of the low-hanging winter sun, it was just an ordinary, average Grand Fleet day. A squadron of battleships was at target practice, and--even better than their own gunnery officers--we could tally the foam-jets of the "wides" and "shorts" and the narrowing "straddles." A squadron of visiting battle-cruisers had just come to anchor and were swinging lazily round to the tide. Two of them bore names which had echoed to the ends of the world; the names of two of the others--from their distinctive lines and great size, I recognised them as twin giants I had seen still in the slips on the Clyde scarcely a year previously--the world has never heard. A lean, swift scout-cruiser, with an absence of effort almost uncanny, was cleaving its way out toward the entrance just as a line of destroyers came scurrying in after the rolling smoke-pall the following wind was driving on ahead of them. Out over the open seas to the east, across the hill-tops of the islands, dim bituminous dabs on the horizon heralded the return of a battleship squadron, the unceremonious departure of which two days previously had deprived me of the last two courses of my luncheon. In the air was another "kite"--floating indolently above a battleship at anchor--and a half-dozen circling aeroplanes and seaplanes. Countless drifters and launches shuttled in and out through the evenly lined warships. We were now towing with the cable forming an angle of about sixty degrees with the surface of the water, and running up to us straight over the port quarter. The ship had thinned down to an astonishingly slender sliver, not unsuggestive of a speeding arrow whose feathered shaft was represented by the foaming wake. "She's three or four points off the wind," commented my companion, "and yet--once we've steadied down--you see it doesn't make much difference in the weather we make of it. A head wind is desirable in getting up to keep from fouling the upper works amidships, but we hardly need to figure it down to the last degree as in launching a seaplane. When we're really trying to find something, of course, we have to work in any slant of wind that happens to be blowing. The worst condition is a wind from anywhere abaft the beam, blowing at a faster rate than the towing ship is moving through the water. In that case, the balloon simply drifts ahead to the end of its tether, swings around, and gives the ship a tow. If the wind is strong enough--say, forty miles an hour, with the ship doing twenty--to make her give a good steady pull on the cable, it is not so bad; but when it is touch-and-go between ship and wind the poor old 'kite' is all over the shop, and about as difficult to work in as to ride in--which is saying a good deal." "What do you mean by work?" I asked. "Looking out for things and reporting them to the ship over the telephone," was the reply. "Perhaps even trying to run them down and destroy them."