sist on kissing him. If
that was the only inconvenience resulting from a wound, it seemed to
me to be a form of unpleasantness that one might manage to put up
with.

When the time for departure came, Meyendorff was quite unhappy at my
objecting to his accompanying us all the way to Tornea; but we meant
to travel through Finland disguised as small fry and in plain clothes.
On the occasion of our previous heading for home, our leaving had been
advertised in all the newspapers; the Embassy had drawn the attention
of the authorities to this, and the Press had been directed to make
no mention in future of foreign officers starting for Scandinavia.
Even if the enemy under-water flotilla was hardly likely to make
special endeavours to catch us on the Bergen-Newcastle trip, there was
no object in running unnecessary risks by letting them know that we
were coming along.

We enjoyed a rare stroke of luck on the voyage across the North Sea
this time. Our packet was plodding peacefully along on a hazy, grey
forenoon, about half-way to the Tyne, when the faint silhouettes of a
brace of destroyers were descried racing athwart our course a good
many miles ahead. We were watching them disappear far away on the
starboard bow, when others suddenly hove in sight looming up through
the mist, all of them going like mad in the same direction, and then
four great shadowy battle-cruisers showed themselves steaming hard
across our front, four or five miles away. The armada, a signal
manifestation of vitality and power and speed, was evidently making
for Rosyth; it had no doubt been on the prowl about the Skagerrack,
and it presumably meant to coal at high pressure and then to get busy
again. Such a spectacle would naturally be an everyday occurrence to
the Sister Service; but to a landsman this assemblage of fighting
craft going for all they were worth was tremendously impressive as a
demonstration of British maritime might--far more impressive than
interminable rows of warships, moored and at rest, such as one had
seen gathered together between Southampton Water and Spithead for a
Royal Review.

What surprised one most perhaps was the wide extent of the water-area
which this battle-cruiser squadron covered, consisting as it did of
only a quartette of capital ships after all, with their attendant ring
of mosquito-craft keeping guard ahead, astern and on the flanks. The
leading pair of destroyers cannot have been much short of twenty miles