e were left no time to mourn that any more
than the finish of the _Nectar_. Hardly had we left the wreck of her
astern than a full salvo of large shells--I think they must have come
from one of the battle cruisers, for they were much heavier than
anything the light cruisers were firing--struck only thirty or forty
yards short of us. The shells were bunched together like a salvo of
air-bombs kicked loose all at once. The wall of water they threw up shut
everything on that side off from sight for a few seconds, and when the
spouts settled down there was a Hun destroyer inside of a mile away. I
jumped up to give her course and speed to the 'T.I.', but before I had
time more than to see that she had two funnels and many tubes the
bursting projes from our foremost and midships guns began knocking her
to pieces so fast that I soon saw there was no use of wasting a mouldie
on the job.

"I saw the captain waving encouragement from the bridge to the crew of
the midships guns, and, when the noise died down for a moment, I heard
him shout, 'You've got her! Give it to her!' Just then another salvo was
plastered a-straddle of us, and I saw a fragment of shell knock the
sight-setter of the midships gun out of his seat. He looked a little
dazed as he climbed back, but his eye must have been as good as ever,
for I saw his next shot make a hit square on a whaler they were lowering
from the sinking Hun and blow it to bits. A minute or two more, and the
destroyer itself blew up and disappeared under a column of steam and
smoke.

"That," continued Prince, beginning to prod anew his neglected sprayers,
"just about concluded our day's work. As there was no longer any
prospect of getting in mouldie-range of any of the big Huns, and as none
of the little Huns were in sight to fight with gun-fire, it must have
occurred to the captain that it was time he was rejoining the flotilla.
There was only some dark blurs on the north'ard skyline to steer for at
first, and the Huns did all they knew to keep us from getting there,
too. For a while we were doing nothing but playing 'hide-and-seek' among
the salvoes they tried to stop us with, and I have heard since that the
way the captain used his helm to avoid being hit at this stage of the
show was rated as about the cleverest work of the kind in the whole
battle.

"It was the Fifth B.S.--the _Queen Elizabeth_ class--that we caught up
to first, and a grand sight it was, the four of them standing up an