My foot was on the ladder, when the sight of a seagull dancing a giddy _pas seul_ on the titillating horn of a mine bobbing off astern recalled a story an Italian destroyer skipper had once told me, of how he had seen an Albanian sea eagle blow itself up as a consequence of executing a precisely similar manoeuvre. I lingered to get the chief yeoman's opinion of what I had hitherto considered a highly apocryphal yarn, and when he was called away to take down a signal to pass back to the destroyers, the loom of what looked to me like a ship taking shape in the fog drew me over to the starboard rail. It dissolved and disappeared as my glass focussed on it, only to raise its amorphous blur again a point or so further abeam. Then I recognized it, and smiled indulgent welcome to an old friend of many watches--the first cousin to the mirage, the looming shape which a man peering hard into thick fog keeps _thinking_ he sees at one end or the other of the arc of his angle of vision. Any man actually on watch knows better than to let his mind take liberties with "fog pictures," and not a few of those who have done so have had the last picture of the series merge into a reality of wind and water and a good ship banging itself to pieces on a line of submerged rocks. But I--as so often in voyages of late--was on the bridge without duties or responsibilities. I was free to let the pictures take what form they would; and it must have been what the chief yeoman had just said about the weariness of waiting for the Huns that turned my mind to what I had heard and seen of the four-year vigil of the Grand Fleet. There was a picture of Scapa as I had seen it on my earliest visit from the basket of a kite balloon towed from the old _Campania_, the same _Campania_ which now rested on the bottom of the Firth of Forth, and the top-masts of which we had passed a half cable's length to port as the _Hercules_ steamed out the day before. There were golden sun-notes weaving in a Maypole dance with rollicking slate-black cloud shadows in that picture; but in the next--where the surface of the Flow was beaten to the whiteness of the snow-clad hills hemming it in--the brooding light was darkly sinister and ominous of import, for that was the winter day when we had word that two destroyers, which the might of the Grand Fleet was powerless to save, were being banged to bits against a cliff a few miles outside the gates. Then there was a picture of an Orkney midsummer midnight--just such a night, the officer of the watch told me, as the one on which he had seen the _Hampshire_, with Kitchener pacing the quarter-deck alone, pass out to her doom two years previously--with a fitful green light flooding the Flow, reflected from the sun circling just below the northern horizon, and every kite balloon in the air at the time being torn from its cable and sent flying towards Scandinavia before the ninety-mile gale which had sprung up from nowhere without warning.