The moon was all but full, and cast a silvery sheen over the still waters of the harbor. Every prospect during the early afternoon and evening had cheered us with a hope of a still night, but the “kill joy” barometer that hung over our little fireplace had been steadily falling. We had hoped that, like our weather men at home, it might be on one of its breaks. But before we had fairly cleared the harbor our friend, the moon, politely made its apologies, and, with a last flicker of light, disappeared into a cloud bank. One by one the stars that twinkled brightly in the cold, crisp air faded from sight, until at nine o’clock the only light on the horizon was the steady glow of the beacon on a bit of a peninsula that lay to the south of us. In half an hour we had cleared this, and the _France_ was riding with long sweeps over an oily sea that was coming up from the south in long rippleless swells. An occasional gust of wind foretold what was coming. With each minute the bursts became more frequent, and in an hour we were running into a steady gale that by midnight had become a veritable tempest, driving the waves before it in great sweeping billows, their crests shrouded in spray that blew across our bridge and decks almost unintermittently. By midnight the hope of a night’s sleep had been abandoned, and the roar and crash of waters flooding us at every dip, mingled with the melancholy howling of the wind, that seemed to whip and circle around our little craft like an avenging spirit, created a tumult, which would have banished rest even had we been able to remain in our bunks. As a matter of fact, this was a proposition which I abandoned after a few futile attempts. Earlier in the day I had weighed carefully our next move, and had decided to run for the little port of Sinope, almost due south of Sevastopol on the coast of Asia Minor. I wanted to go there for two reasons: first, because it was a cable station, from which I could send my Sevastopol story, and, second, because there I hoped I might learn more definitely of the situation in the Caucasus, which had been reported so acute at my last two ports of call. I figured that if the outlook there was good for a “story,” I would keep right on down the Black Sea, and if not, I would be within easy run of the Bosphorus or any other point of interest. Hence it was that we were driving southward through the storm on this winter night.