The expression regarding the fleet, squadron, or even the single ship ready to sail at a moment's notice is as much of a figure of speech as is the similar one about the army which is going to fight to the last man. A good many moments must inevitably elapse between the time definite orders come to sail and the actual getting under weigh. But the final preparations _can_ be reduced to such a routine that the ship receiving them can be got ready to sail with hardly more than a ripple of unusual activity appearing in the ebb and flow of the life of those who man her. No river ferry-boat ever cast off her moorings and paddled out on one of her endlessly repeated shuttlings with less apparent effort than the _Zeus_, when, after gulping some scores of fathoms of Gargantuan anchor chain into her capacious maw, she pivoted easily around in the churning boil of reversed screws, took her place in line, and followed in the wake of the flagship toward the point where a notch in the bare rounded periphery of encircling hills marked the way to the open sea. Nowhere else in the temperate latitudes is there so strange a meeting and mingling place of airs and waters as at the "Northern Base." The butterfly chases of sunshine and showers even in December and January are suggestive of nothing so much as what a South Pacific Archipelago would be but with fifty or sixty degrees colder temperature. Dancing golden sunmotes were playing spirited cross-tag with slatily sombre cloud-shadows as we nosed out through the mazes of the booms, but with the first stinging slaps of the vicious cross-swells of a turbulent sea, a swirling bank of fog came waltzing over the aimlessly chopping waters, and reared a vaporous wall across our path. The flagship melted into the milling mists, and dimmed down to an amorphous blur with just enough outline to enable us a sight to correct our position in line. In turn, the towered and pinnacled head-on silhouette of our next astern ship grew soft and shadowy, and where proper perspective would have placed the fourth was a swaying wisp of indeterminate image which might just as well have been an imminently wheeling seagull as a distantly reeling super-dreadnought. The comparison is by no means so ridiculous as it sounds, for only the day before a naval flying-man had told me how he once started to bring his seaplane down on sighting a duck (which was really some hundreds of feet in the air) because he took it for a destroyer, and how, later, he had failed to "straighten out" quickly enough because he thought a trawler was a duck in flight. The lean grey shadows which slipped ghostily into step with us in the fog-hastened twilight of three o'clock might just as well (had we not known of the rendezvous) have been lurking wolves as protecting sheep-dogs. "Now that we've picked up our destroyers," said the officer who paced the quarter-deck with me, "we'll be getting on our way. Let's go down to tea."