receding night,
and by common consent we all lay-to.

We had not long to wait. We saw some signalling going on between the
flagship and the three craft that had come out to meet the fleet; saw
the trio fall into line in rear of the retreating fleet; and then, while
our glasses were glued to our eyes as we watched the procession of great
ships sweeping majestically toward the harbour's mouth--from which they
were then little more than a mile distant--we suddenly beheld a
tremendous flash of fire envelop the bows of the _Petropavlosk_, the
flagship, which was leading the way into the harbour. The flash was
accompanied by the upheaval of a gigantic cone of water and an outburst
of thick yellow smoke which at once told us that one of our mines had
got in its deadly work. Instantly a great exultant roar of "Banzai
Nippon!" burst forth from the throats of the eagerly watching Japanese,
but it was as instantly checked when they began to realise the full
magnitude of the disaster that had befallen their enemy. For even
before the sound of the shattering explosion reached our ears we saw her
fore topmast fall, saw long tongues of flame leap up from her decks, saw
her-two funnels whirl over and fall, one after the other, while her
bridge, pilot-house, and foremast soared high into the air; and so
tremendous was the force of the explosion that actually one of her
6-inch gun turrets was torn bodily from its strong fastenings and hurled
some twenty feet aloft, to crash downward again upon the hapless ship's
deck, while a great burst of flame, probably due to the explosion of her
boilers, shot up where her two funnels had stood a moment before. A
series of heavy explosions followed, seeming to indicate the explosion
of her magazines, and then the doomed ship became enveloped in a thick
haze of green smoke, in the midst of which played great streams of fire.
Through that terrible green haze we were just able to see that she had
taken a heavy list to starboard; then her bows dipped, her stern rose
until her two propellers were lifted out of the water, a great
mushroom-shaped pillar of smoke shot up from her, and--she was gone!
And all this had happened in the short space of two minutes, during
which shells from our battleships were falling thick and fast about the
Russian ships, which had stopped their engines when the explosion
occurred, while some of them lowered boats, in the hope of being able to
render assistance to the unfor