The next was of five ships of the _Kaiser_ class, as they had appeared from the _Emperor of India_, which, with the rest of the Second Division, was escorting a squadron of the enemy to Scapa for internment. We saw the German ships at closer range now, and the better we saw them the worse they looked. Their fine solidity was less impressive than from a distance, for now our glasses revealed the filth of the decks, the lack of paint, and the slovenly, sullen attitude of the motley garbed figures lounging along the rails. We passed within a biscuit toss of the _Kaiserin_ when their leading ship, the _Friedrich der Grosse_, lost her bearings in some way and failed to follow the _Canada_ through the anti-submarine boom off the end of Flotta, an action which only the smartest kind of seamanship on the part of the division of _Iron Dukes_ prevented from developing into a serious disaster. Most of the Huns--to judge by the expression on the faces leering across at us--would have welcomed a smash; but it was avoided by a hair, and they ultimately straightened themselves out, straggled through into the Flow, and on to their more or less final resting-place, off the inner entrance to Gutter Sound. The final picture, as it chanced, which my fancy projected on the curtain of the fog was one that embraced what I saw from the steam pinnace which was taking me to the _Impérieuse_, on my way back to Rosyth. An angry Orkney sunset was flaring over the hills of Hoy--a sullenly red glow, gridironed by thin strata of black cloud like the bars of a grate--and a sinister squall was advancing from the direction of Stromness to the northward. For a few moments the hot light of the sunset had silhouetted the confused hulls of battleships and battle-cruisers against the silvered seas beyond, and revealed the disordered phalanx of the moored destroyers blocking the mouth of Gutter Sound; then it was quenched by the onrush of the storm clouds, and all that was left of the High Seas Fleet disappeared into shadow and driving rain. It was a far cry, I reflected, from the Kaiser's "Our future lies upon the seas!" and Admiral Rodman's "The German ships are of no use to anybody; the simplest solution of the problem of their disposition is to take the whole lot to sea and sink them." And yet-- Suddenly, stereoscopically clear, on the blank sheet of the fog left as the High Sea Fleet faded from sight, the head-on silhouette of an unmistakably German light cruiser appeared. For an instant the soaring mast and the broad bridge suggested that my fancy had materialized the _Königsberg_ again. Then the rat-a-tat of a signal searchlight recalled me to my senses, and it did not need the chief yeoman of signals' "There she is, sir; sending away a boat to bring us a pilot," to tell me we had finally rendezvoused with the _Regensburg_. I descended to the quarter-deck to see the pilot come over the side.