The ship wakes up, she is alive. The engine-room gongs clang down in her depths. A few signal flags flutter aloft. The admiral is signalling to his squadron to alter course to head off the enemy, and to increase speed by so many revolutions. The big ship gathers way. Her consorts follow in the curve of her foaming wake, and with every big gun trained forward the lithe grey leviathans tear over the watery plain in search of their quarry. An hour passes. Nothing is seen but the scouting cruisers and a minute speck in the remote spaces of the sky, which someone thinks is a sea-plane, but which may well be a grey gull in the middle distance. Presently, however, a growing darkness along the north-eastern horizon becomes recognizable as smoke--the smoke of many furnaces. Against its growing blackness one of our distant light cruisers shows for a moment as a white ship. Black smoke is pouring from her funnels also, and amidst it all is a sudden violet-white flash. After an age comes the dull "thud" of her cannon. Now she turns away to port. There are more vivid flashes and the "thudding" of her guns grows continuous. Soon answering flashes sparkle from amidst the smoke-pall on the horizon, and first one then another nebulous outline of a warship disintegrates itself. Flashes break from their sides also, and the noise of the firing swells into a steady roll of sound rising and falling on the wind. We again increase speed. Black smoke billows from our funnels, the bow wave rises higher, and now and again a cloud of spray swishes over our decks. Then "Cra--ash!" The fore-turret has spoken. The ship trembles from stem to stern. We are striking in to the assistance of our scouting cruiser. Through the glasses appears what looks like an iceberg towering over the enemy's nearest cruiser. We've missed her. But the spotting officer is busy in the control-platform aloft, passing down corrections for transmission to the various gun-stations, and when a second explosion roars from the starboard turret, the enemy's cruiser, after disappearing for some seconds in a black and inky cloud of smoke, bursts into flames. Her consort and our scouting vessel draw farther and farther away to the northward, fighting fiercely. We continue driving through the tumbling waters, till, with a slight freshening of the wind, the black smoke we are approaching thins off into nothingness, and we see far down on the horizon four or five separate columns of smoke. With a good glass we can distinguish masts and funnels as if lightly sketched in pencil. They have sighted us at the same time, and seem to melt together into one indistinct mass. They are altering course, turning their backs to us and heading for the east.