Suddenly comes the thrilling cry of ‘Out derricks!’ and there is a racing of feet and shouted orders. Then the great derricks swing out from the ship’s side, a boat’s length above the boat-deck. They are hinged, and supported down almost to the draught line of the ship. They reach out forty feet clear of the ship’s side. The Leviathan is bursting through the final miles of wild seas; and then the telegraph bell rings, and she slows down, not more than ten or twelve hundred yards to wind’ard of the burning hull, which rises and falls, a stupendous spectacle on the waste of black seas. The fifty-thousand-ton racer has performed her noble work, and now the work lies with the boats and the men. * * * * * The searchlight flashes down on to the near water, and the boats shoot out in the ‘travellers,’ then are dropped clear of the mighty flanks of the Mother Ship. The Leviathan lies to windward of them, to break the force of the seas, and oil bags are put out. The people in the burning ship greet the ship with mad cheers. The women are hove bodily into the seas, on the ends of lines. They float in their cork jackets. Men take children in their arms, and jump, similarly equipped. And all are easily picked up by the boats, in the blaze of the rescuer’s searchlights that brood on leagues of ocean, strangely subdued by the floods of oil which the big ship is pumping on to the seas. Everywhere lies the strange sheen of oil, here in a sudden valley of brine, unseen, or there on the shoulder of some monstrous wave, suddenly eased of its deadliness; or again, the same fluorescence swirls over some half-league of eddy-flattened ocean, resting between efforts—tossing minor oil-soothed ridges into the tremendous lights. Then the Leviathan steams to leeward of the burning ship, and picks up her boats. She takes the rescued passengers aboard, and returns to windward; then drops the boats again, and repeats the previous operations, until every man, woman, and child is saved. As the last boat swings up at the end of the great derricks aboard the _Cornucopia_ there is a final volcano of flame from the burning ship, lighting up the black belly of the sky into billowing clouds of redness. There falls the eternal blackness of the night.... The _Vanderfield_ has gone. The Leviathan swings round through the night, with her six hundred saved; and begins to sing again in her deep heart, laying the miles and the storm astern once more, in a deep low thunder. _THE WAR IN PERSPECTIVE._ BY DR. W. H. FITCHETT.