When two ships, steaming on opposite courses at something like ten knots, meet in a fog the usual result is a collision, and nothing but the quick-wittedness of the captain of the _Viceroy_ prevented one on this occasion. The stranger, in starboarding his helm, bared a long expanse of rusty paunch for the nose of the destroyer to bury itself in, as a sword-fish stabs a whale, and that is what must inevitably have happened--with disastrous consequences to both vessels in all probability--had the _Viceroy_ also attempted to avoid collision by turning to port. Realizing this with a sure judgment, the captain fell back on an alternative which would hardly have been open to him with a destroyer less powerfully built and engined than the latest "V's." I have already told how, in the lock at Brunsbüttel, he had stopped his ship dead, just short of the gates, by going astern with the engines at the proper moment. Here, in scarcely more time than it takes to tell it, he not only stopped her dead but had her backing (at constantly accelerating speed) away from the slowly turning merchantman. The jar (followed by a prolonged throbbing) was almost as sharp as when the air-brakes are set on the wheels of a speeding express, and the outraged wake of her, like the back of a cat whose fur has been rubbed the wrong way, arched in a tumbling fountain high above her quivering stern. But back she went, and so gave the burly freighter room to blunder by in. There was just time to note her high bulwarks, two or three suspicious-looking superstructures (which one's passing acquaintance with "Q" boats suggested as possibly masking guns), and a folded seaplane housed on the poop, before the menacing apparition thinned and melted into the fog as suddenly as it had appeared. "I think that ship is the _Wolf_," volunteered the pilot, watching with side-cast eyes the effects of the announcement. "You will perhaps remember it as the great raider of the Indian Ocean." The captain looked up quickly from the chart as though about to say something; then thought better of it, and, with a wistful smile, turned back to his study of the channel. I had seen him smile resignedly like that a few days previously off the Elbe estuary when a speeding widgeon, whose line of flight had promised to carry it right over the forecastle, had sheered off without giving him a shot. What he had said on that occasion was, "Hang the blighter; another chance missed!" Going aft to breakfast, I was hailed by Korvettenkapitän M---- (the officer commanding all Baltic air stations who was accompanying us to Warnemünde and Rügen), warming himself at the engine-room hatchway, and informed that the ship just sighted was "the famous raider, _Moewe_, that has been so many times through the English blockade." It was he that was correct, as it turned out. We found the _Moewe_ anchored three or four cables' lengths on the port bow of the _Hercules_ when we returned to Kiel the following evening.