auty, in every way fit for the
risky business we were engaged upon. Needless to say she had not only
been selected for speed, but was rendered in appearance as
unobtrusive as possible. Besides lying low in the water, she was
painted a dead grey, funnels and all. The sort of coal we used,
anthracite, burned with very little smoke, and even that little was
obviated, as we approached the seat of war, by a hood on the
smoke-stack. She slipped through the water silently and noiselessly as
one of its natural denizens, and on a dark night, with all lights out,
could hardly have been perceived, even at a short distance, from the
deck of another vessel.

Without the ship's log to refer to, I cannot be certain of dates and
distances, but it was in the latter days of August that we were
steaming up the Yellow Sea, where, by the way, the water is _bluer_
than I have ever seen it elsewhere. In some places it presents, on a
moonlit night, the appearance of liquefied ultramarine, though it
certainly is muddy enough about the coasts. Our destination was
Tientsin, one of the most northern of the treaty ports, and of course
we kept in with the Chinese mainland as closely as possible to avoid
the Japanese cruisers. All had gone well, and we were fast approaching
the entrance to the Gulf of Pechili, when we encountered one of those
tempests which are only to be met with in the Eastern seas--pitch-black
darkness, rain in one sheeted flood, like a second Deluge,
blinding flashes of forked lightning more terrific than the
gloom, and an almost uninterrupted crash of thunder amidst which the
uproar of a pitched field would be inaudible. With our enormous
steam-power we held our own for a while although unable to make much
headway; but at last a tremendous sea took us right abeam on the port
side; the main hatch had been left open, a small Niagara poured down
it, and doused our fires. No canvas would have stood the hurricane
that was blowing, and for some time we were in a serious way. Before
our engines, which fortunately held firm, were working again, we had
drifted helplessly over to the Corean coast, and it was all we could
do to claw off-shore until the tempest abated, which it did very
suddenly, as it had risen.

As the wind fell, we ran under the lee of an island, oblong, high, and
thickly wooded, not far from a heavy promontory of the coast. Here we
lay for two or three hours repairing damages. Of course we had no
accurate idea wherea