As we passed one great tower of steel after another a breezy midshipman began speaking of their "points" and "records" as he might have reviewed the exhibits at a Bench Show. There was the _Marlborough_, which the Germans had "sunk" with a torpedo at Jutland, and there--"that cubistic nightmare" (referring to her scientific camouflage)--the new "----," which was supposed to "absorb" torpedoes as a Stilton cheese does port, and to improve day by day under the treatment. "The _matlotes_ will tell you," he said, "that she goes off and mooches round the U-boat lanes just to tempt them to use up their mouldies on her so that there won't be so many left for merchant ships!" And there was the ----, and he went on to tell me of one of her gunners who, writing home after the battle, had stated that there was a time when he had been unable to make his way aft from his turret on account of the heaps of dead bodies blocking the way. "You know very well that we were not hit during the battle," the irate Captain, before whom the culprit had been forthwith, admonished. "What prompted you to tell such a mischievous lie?" "I was upholding the glory of the Gran' Fleet, Sir," was the unabashed answer. "I couldn't bear to 'ave 'em thinkin' at 'ome that the blinkin' battle cruisers 'ad been 'avin' all the fun o' the go." Another even line of foretops, seeming to float through the air above the skyline of an interposing island like a file of flying geese, told us, as we cleared the barrage, that another Squadron was getting under weigh; but these, with the "Cats" creeping off under their back-blown smoke trails, into a bank of purple mist, were all that were in sight when the swift winter twilight shut down and left us ploughing alone down the lane between our screening destroyers. It was just at this time--in the short 'tween-daylight-and-dark interval--that a strange thing happened. The sea was smooth, silken smooth, with hardly more than an eight- or ten-knot breeze ruffling its surface, and the ship was--so far as pitch or roll were concerned--as steady as though chocked up in a dry dock. Suddenly, a couple of cables' lengths ahead, a thin white line of foam appeared, serpentining along at about right angles to our course. It appeared to be quite the same sort of little froth-path that one has come to know in the seas of all the world as the marker of the place where tide meets tide, a phenomenon indicating conflicting but rarely dangerous countercurrents.