ines working, and a speed of sixteen knots at the
best. Nor did we know from minute to minute when another engine would
break down.

At the beginning of this flight we almost held our own, shaping a
curious course, which, if pursued, would have brought us ultimately to
the Irish coast again. For some hours during the morning I thought that
we gained slightly, and those following evidently felt that it would be
a waste of shell to fire at us, for they were silent: only great
volumes of smoke came from the funnels of the battleships, and we knew
that their efforts to get greater speed were prodigious.

We ran in this state all the morning, our men silent and brooding;
Black smoked cigar after cigar with a dogged assumption of
indifference; the German came to us often with his desperate gestures
and his woe-begone face. It was well on in the afternoon before the
position changed in any way, and I had gone down with the Captain to
the lower saloon to make the pretence of lunching. There we
sat--"Four-Eyes" with us--a miserable trio, cracking jokes, and
expressing desperate hopes; sending up the nigger every other moment to
learn how the ironclad lay, and much comforted when at the fifth coming
he said--

"You gain, sar, plenty sar; you run right away, sar."

"We do?" cried Black, who jumped from his seat and ran up the
companion-way to confirm the tale, and he shouted down to us, "Crack
another bottle, if it's the last, and give it to the nigger; we're
leaving them!"

His elation was contagious. "Four-Eyes" awoke from his lethargy, and
drank a pint of the wine at a draught. The nigger put out a glass with
a satisfied leer. The Captain took a bottle and laid his hand on the
cork. But there it stayed, for at that moment there came a horrible
sound of grating and tearing from the engine-room, and it was succeeded
by a moment of dead and chilling silence.

"The second engine's gone," said a man above, quite calmly, and we knew
the worst, and went on deck again.

We found the crew sullen and muttering, but Friedrich, the engineer's
eldest son, sat at the top of the engine-room ladder, and tears rolled
down his face. The great ship still trembled under the shock of the
breakdown and was not showing ten knots. The foremost ironclad crept up
minute by minute; and before we had realised the whole extent of the
mishap, she was within gunshot of us; but her colleagues were some
miles away, she outpacing them all through it.