Page:Barbour--For the freedom from the seas.djvu/234

 booms just two days later, picking her way between anchored mines as daintily as any fine lady avoiding mud puddles, and, wigwagging a last signal to the forts, headed south. Nelson saw the hills of Queenstown fade into the brown and purple shadows of evening and finally disappear. Later the cruiser altered her course and in the first full darkness the light of Fastnet flashed at them from starboard. Nelson slept finely that night, for the Gyandotte rolled comfortably and creaked and rubbed her seams and was quite home-like again.

In the morning they were out of sight of land, lounging over a calm gray-blue sea in company with three destroyers. At daylight the four ships scuttled into line and held a deal of conversation by means of gay signal flags. The lookouts had hourly spasms, for that summer the waters around Great Britain and France for three hundred miles away from the coasts were thick with floating débris, and, with sufficient imagination on the part of the lookout, an empty lard pail makes an excellent periscope a mile away, while an abandoned mattress at two miles is as fine a conning tower for practice purposes as soul could desire. Those destroyers were new at the game and filled with enthusiasm, and half a dozen times that day 209