It was now about six o'clock in the evening. During the greater part of the day the weather had been beautifully fine; but toward three o'clock in the afternoon a heavy bank of dark, slate-coloured cloud had gathered in the eastern quarter of the sky, so quickly rising and spreading that, by five o'clock, the entire firmament had become obscured, the wind dropped to a dead calm, the light dwindled to a murky, unnatural kind of twilight, there were a few flickerings of sheet lightning, low down on the horizon, occasionally accompanied by a low muttering of distant thunder, and the mercury was dropping with rather ominous rapidity. I confess that, for my own part, I felt a bit puzzled; I did not quite know what to make of the weather indications. It might be that nothing worse than a violent thunderstorm was brewing; but against this theory there was to be set the sudden and ominous decline of the barometric pressure. We had fulfilled our task, and were preparing to get under way, when Takebe, who was in command of the torpedo flotilla, came aboard to consult with our skipper as to the advisability of going to sea, in the face of such threatening conditions. Unfortunately, our escort was composed entirely of torpedo-boats; and although they were staunch enough little craft of their kind, they were nothing like such good sea boats as our destroyers. The latter were, under able management, capable of riding out practically any weather, but with the torpedo-boats it was rather a different story. Some of those that we had with us were small and rather ancient, their engines were not to be too implicitly relied upon, and their boilers were nearly worn-out; indeed, they would never have been detailed for the service, had it been thought that there would be any likelihood of real righting. If by any chance they should happen to be caught at sea in anything like a heavy gale, and anything should go wrong with either their engines or their boilers, the probability was that they would founder, taking all hands with them.