"I trust we have 'chosen _our_ moment' carefully," I said to myself after reading those lines and reflecting what a large part of their time the _Dulcibella_, _Kormoran_, and all the other craft in the "Riddle" had spent careened upon sand-spits. To reassure myself, I leaned back and asked one of the German officers if boats didn't run aground pretty often on that run. "Oh, yes, most often," was the reply, "but only at low water or when the fog is very thick. With this much water, and when we can see as far as we can now"--there was about a quarter of a mile of visibility--"there is no danger. Our difficulty will come when we try to return this evening on the low water." It may have been my imagination, but I thought he put a shade more accent on that _try_ than a real optimist would have done under similar circumstances. But then, I told myself, it was hardly a time when one could expect a German officer to be optimistic about anything. Heading out through the well-marked channel of the _Buse Tief_, between the sands of the _Itzendorf Plate_ to port and _Hohe Riff_ to starboard, twenty minutes found the launch in the opener waters off the west end of Norderney where, with its light draught, it had no longer to thread the winding of the buoyed fairway. Standing on northward until the red roofs and white walls of the town sharpened into ghostly relief on the curtain of the mist, course was altered five or six points to starboard, and we skirted a broad stretch of sandy beach, from the upper end of which the even slopes of concreted "runs" were visible, leading back to where, dimly outlined in their darker opacity, a long row of great hangars loomed fantastically beyond the dunes. Doubling a sharp spit, the launch nosed in and brought up alongside the landing of a slip notched out of the side of the little natural harbour. The Commander of the station--a small man, but wiry and exceedingly well set up--met us as we stepped off the launch. Then, and throughout the visit, his quiet dignity of manner and ready (but not too ready) courtesy struck a welcome mean between the incongruous blends of sullenness and subserviency we had encountered in meeting the officers in the German warships. He saluted each member of the party as he landed, but tactfully refrained from offering his hand to any but the attached German officers. It was this attitude on the part of the Commander, together with the uniformly courteous but uneffusive demeanour of the other officers with whom we were thrown in contact, that made the visit to Norderney perhaps the pleasantest of all the many inspections carried out in Germany.