Another ship which was plainly having a bad time was some kind of a cruiser whose long row of funnels was punching holes in a segment of skyline. There was a suggestion of messiness forward, but nothing we attached any importance to until word was wirelessed that she had just had her bridge carried away by a heavy sea, and that the navigating officer had been severely injured. The latter was known personally to several of the wardroom officers, and at lunch speculation as to what hurt he might have received led to an extremely interesting discussion of the "ways of a wave with a man"; also of the comparative seaworthiness of light cruisers and destroyers. The things that waves have done to all three of them since the war began (to say nothing of the things all three have done in spite of waves) is a story of its own. The barometer continued to fall all day, with the wind rising a mile of velocity for every point of drop. The seas, though higher and heavier, were also more regular and less inclined to catch the ship with her weather-rail down. The low cloud-bank of mid-forenoon had by early dusk grown to a heavens-obscuring mask of ominous import, and, by dark, snow was beginning to fall. The ship was reeling through the blackness of the pit when I clambered to the deck after dinner, so that the driving spray and ice-needles struck the face before one saw them by even the thousandth of a second. The darkness was such as one almost never encounters ashore, and it was some time before I accustomed myself to close my eyes against the unseen missiles (when turning to windward) without deliberately telling myself to do so in advance. Into the Stygian pall the vivid golden triangles from the signal searchlights on the bridge flashed like the stab of a flaming sword. One instant the darkness was almost palpable enough to lean against; the next, the silhouette of funnels and foretop pricked into life, but only to be quenched again before the eye had time to fix a single detail. So brief was any one flash that the action in each transient vision was suspended as in an instantaneous photograph, yet the effect of the quick succession of flashes was of continuous motion, like the kinema. From where I stood, the heart of the fluttering golden halos, where a destroyer winked back its answer, were repeatedly obliterated by the inky loom of a wave, but the reflection was always thrown high enough into the mist to carry the message. Returning to the wardroom by the way of the mess-decks, I saw the youth who had offered me the anti-seasick lozenges in the morning. Now quite recovered, he was himself playing the pork-on-a-string game with one of the only two "prostrates" still in sight. The following morning--though the weather, if anything, was worse than ever--all evidences of "indisposition" had disappeared. * * * * *