Each transport had its guard, whose bright surveillance never shifted, never wavered, from dusk to dawn. These sentinel dreadnaughts never turned a search-light to sweep the surrounding sea. They held their transports steadily in the white glare. There was not an inch of ocean within their lines that was not ablaze. A fragment of driftwood could not have floated into that vivid sea without being detected by a hundred eyes. _The Invader Off the Coast_ Now the news came fast and faster, as the fleet, and its hovering spies, came nearer. The _Alabama_, sister-ship to the _Kearsarge_, by haphazard fortune got between two enemy scouts and the main fleet, and accomplished by sudden attack what she never could have accomplished by speed. She sank them within twenty minutes, and returned without injury. It was 13-inch guns against 8-inch, and the story was as it always is. The inferior enemy ships went down like pasteboard, under the fire of the turret guns on the American vessel. On the same day, almost at the same hour, the scout cruiser _Birmingham_, at the other end of the enemy line, sent report that the destroyer _Bainbridge_, tiniest of the division, had driven her two 18-inch torpedoes home and sunk an armored cruiser that had fallen out of line to repair some unknown injury to its machinery. The _Bainbridge_ did not tell its own story. The little boat and her men were blasted into nothing within ten minutes by a battle-cruiser that had turned to protect her mate. These disasters, that might have been appalling to a lesser sea-power, left the great navy of the Coalition unshaken. Steadily, imperturbably, it kept on its way. So there came the day when coasters and small craft sped wildly into the shelter of Boston and New York Harbors, into Long Island Sound and into the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays. They had seen the enemy. Next morning, in a gray, transparent, peaceful April dawn, watchers on the coast, gazing across the empty, flat Atlantic, to the immense half-circle of the horizon, saw innumerable tiny objects just sticking up above the rim of the sea. Through the glass they seemed to be little perches of skeleton iron built in the deep ocean. Set at beautifully precise distances apart, they dotted the sharply outlined edge of water and sky, north and south, far beyond vision. Innocent and quiet they appeared, as they stood there, growing slowly, very slowly, up out of the far sea. And the roaring presses, spouting forth extra editions east, west, north and south, told the United States of America: INVADER APPEARS OFF AMERICAN COAST II THE COAST BOMBARDED Never, even in after years, was it determined whence the news of the enemy ships came first. Almost as easily might a land invaded by locusts have decided what eye first saw the coming cloud, or at what precise spot.