“I met a dispatch-boat coming to make summons of surrender, and, in spite of my white flag, they took me prisoner! How I restrained myself--and these people in the hollow of my hand! When I got at last to the Admiral--it is Yerburgh on the _Queen Mary_--he 'pirated' me--but I have no time Yonder, you see, are the Americans. British won't go back: I doubt if they believe--'under orders', and so on. By the way, you shouldn't stay there--no longer safe--” He was away: for the moment was near, the _Boodah_ now surrounded with a series of floating squares hanging deep torpedo-nets against submarines, on both horizons effusions of smoke, the ships no more visions, but middle-sized sea-things, seeming fixed in the thick of the sea, though steaming quickly. Hogarth watched them through a hand-glass, while Loveday, ghastly pallid, whispered: “Come, Richard, come”, but still lingered a little, seeing them grow up--like the infant, the lad, the hairy man--toiling at the bigness of the sea, looking stripped, prepared for tempest They were six miles away--five. Mute lay the _Boodah_; and, surrounding her, perniciously moved the ships at forty-eight revolutions a minute, hardly a cable's interval between the host of them, they seeming no more the playthings of the sea, but its masters, each a travelling throne of power; and as they pared so taciturn, with baleful aspect they trained their cannon upon the sea-fort in their midst: not a soul visible on fort or ships. A long while it seems to last, that noonday stillness, a noonday breezy and oceanic, the sea sharp-edged, hard-looking, dark-blue, tossing spray along its ridges, not rough, but restless, shewing against the ships white foams a moment, which silently glide away. But their Admiral is signalling: _Let her have it!_ and in some moments more yonder to the far north the _Florida_ breaks into quick-flashing ecstasy, like quick-winking Gorgon glances; and the north-east catches it in a single boom; and in ten seconds more it is as if Nature, with sudden yell, feels to her womb the birth-hour come and rueful throes: and where ships had been appears in one minute nothing but a ring of stagnant smoke, tugged into rays and out-sticking clouds, flushed with glares and rouges. And no question of missing: the _Boodah_ stationary and huge; every shell told. But, the deluge over, that thunder-marred visage again looked grimly forth, a face new-risen from smallpox, an apparition, roof-houses gone, lighthouse tops, one of her great 19.5 inchers in fragments, in her casemates seventeen dead.