th the wind and sea getting up as fast as
the glass and the thermometer were going down, was the time or the place
quite what a man would have chosen for anything in the way of cosy
fireside reminiscence. But, both these facts notwithstanding, I felt
that, since I was leaving the _Flyer_ to go to another base directly she
arrived in harbour on the morrow, it would be criminal to neglect the
opportunity of hearing what was perhaps the most sportingly spectacular
of all the Jutland destroyer actions related by one who was actually in
it. I did not dare to distract Melton's attention from his lookout by
drawing him into talking while he was still on watch, but, when he was
relieved at ten o'clock, I waylaid him at the foot of the ladder with a
pot of steaming hot ship's cocoa (foraged from the galley by a
sympathetic ward-room steward) and both pockets of my "lammy" coat
filled with the remnants of a box of assorted Yankee "candy" looted from
the American submarine in which I had been on patrol the week before.

Melton rose to the lure instantly--or perhaps I should say "fell to the
bribe"--for the British bluejacket, if only he were given a chance to
develop, is quite as sweet of tooth as his brother Yank. Because I could
hardly take him to the captain's cabin, which I was occupying for the
moment, for a yarn, and because he, likewise, could not take me down to
the mess deck to disturb the off-watch sleepers with our chatter, there
was nothing to do but carry on as best we could in the friendly lee of
one of the funnels.

It was a night of infernal inkiness by now, and only clinging patches of
soft snow and their blanker blankness revealed the dimly guessable lines
of whaler and cowls and torpedo tubes and the loom of the loftier
bridge. The battleship line was masked completely by the double curtain
of the darkness and the snow, and only a tremulous greyness, barely
discernible in the intervals of the flurries of flakes where the
starboard bow-wave curled back from the _Olympus_, gave an intermittent
bearing to help in keeping station. Underfoot was the blackness of the
pit, not the faintest gleam reflecting from the waves washing over the
weather side to swirl half-knee high about our sea boots. Even overhead
all that was visible were fluttering patches of snow flakes dancing
through the haloes of pale rose radiance that crowned the tops of the
funnels. The wail of the wind in the wireless aerials, the crash of the
sur