_On the North Sea, December 16th._ It has been a wonderful stormy day today; as an officer said: "a typical North Sea winter day"--a leaden sky, roaring wind, smothers of rain, great black-green waves all flecked and blotched in white, big sea birds and little gulls dipping down the wave valleys and soaring up the wave mountains, and the ship taking the most foolish and impossible angles. It was an odd thing to see the gulls which followed the ship, all pointing the other way, in order to maintain their position relatively to the boat and against the heavy wind coming up from astern. At lunch the dishes jumped the racks and smashed along the floor; on the return heave all the fragments rushed back the entire width of the dining saloon. Eating was difficult. Two hours out a British destroyer came dashing up in our wake, making two feet to our one. She was a most picturesque sight, long, low, and speedy, painted black; her towering knife-prow thrust out in front and the long, low hull strung out behind. She "brought us to" with a shot across the bows, and as we wallowed in the trough of the sea, she went by to starboard fairly shaving our side. The officer on her bridge, over which great waves of spray and water broke at every moment, "looked us over" and then bellowed orders to our Captain through a megaphone. My unpractised ear could not through the roar of the wind and the slap of the waves catch all he had to say, but it was something about submarines and a naval battle to the northward and orders to change and take a different course through the mine fields.[3] Whereupon we pursued a very zigzag course. In a moment we would turn 120 degrees and proceed for miles on the new tack. We took at one time or another nearly all directions of the compass. Sometimes the smoke from the funnels went off straight at right angles to our course; at others it preceded us. [Footnote 3: It was on this morning that the German fleet bombarded the towns on the east coast of England.] CHAPTER X VIENNA _Vienna, Saturday, December 19th._ I remained in Berlin only one day and started this morning for Vienna with dispatches, arriving late in the evening after an uneventful fourteen-hour journey. * * * * *