"It was a little after four in the afternoon--almost to a minute the time I had reckoned it would be--that the fine burst of speed the _Cornwall_ had been putting on brought the _Leipzig_ well within range, and I gave the order to open fire. Previous to this the latter had been engaging in a very lively little running fight with the _Glasgow_, neither appearing to be inflicting serious damage to the other. The Hun's four-point-ones were about balanced by the _Glasgow's_ equal number of four-inch, but the latter's two six-inch gave her a comfortable margin that would have decided the issue in her favour in the end. The German gunners, always at their best at the beginning of an action, were making good practice, however, and the _Glasgow_ would have known she had had a fight on her hands before it was over. "At the intervention of the _Cornwall_, with her fourteen six-inch guns, the _Leipzig_--very pluckily and properly--turned her attention to the heavier armed, and therefore the more dangerous, of her two adversaries. We began hitting her at our third salvo, and it must have been about the same time that a shell from one of her well-served four-point-ones came crashing into the _Cornwall_. I must say it was jolly good work for such comparatively small guns. The extremely high angle they had to be fired at, though, reduced their chances of hitting, and I recall especially one beautifully bunched salvo which struck the water so close to the far side of the ship that it might almost have been dropped from an air-ship.