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When they reached the promenade along the Sound shore Oscarovitch pointed to a beautifully-shaped, three-masted, two-funnelled white yacht lying about five hundred yards out, and said: "That is the Grashna, Miss Marmion. I hope you like the look of her." "She is beautiful!" exclaimed Nitocris, recognising at once the vessel which had met the Russian destroyer on the early morning of the 7th.
A large foreign timber-brig lay at my feet, and under the round of her stern cowered, close to the wharf-edge, a slate-coloured, unkempt, two-funnelled craft of a type but I am no expert between the first-class torpedo-boat and the full-blooded destroyer. From her archaic torpedo-tubes at the stern, and quick-firers forward and amidship, she must have dated from the early nineties.
So he took all his meager belongings, which he could easily carry in a blanket roll and a sailor's ditty-bag, and went down half an hour before sailing time. There seemed no one to bar his passage, and he passed up the gangplank aboard a two-funnelled, clean-decked steamer, and made his way to a smoking room aft.
Instantly every telescope and pair of binoculars in the Japanese fleet was levelled at them in an endeavour to identify the craft in sight for we were intimately acquainted with the characteristics of every ship in the enemy's fleet and presently we recognised the big, three-funnelled craft at the head of the port line as the Oslabia, while the two-funnelled battleship leading the starboard line was undoubtedly the Suvaroff, Admiral Rojdestvensky's flagship.
It appeared that, finding himself with spare time on his hands notwithstanding his preparation of the yacht for the projected trip, he had amused himself by designing an elaborate disguise for the craft, under the impression that a time might very possibly arrive when such a disguise would be found exceedingly useful; and he proudly produced a sketch of the said disguise which, when unfolded before the astonished gaze of the two young men, showed the Thetis transmogrified into something resembling a two-funnelled torpedo gunboat, with ram stem and round, spoon-shaped stern all complete.
With distinct minuteness did she print herself upon my consciousness in that five minutes' interval: she was painted a dull and cholera yellow, like many Russian ships, and there was a faded pink space at her bows under the line where the yellow ceased: the ensign at her main I made out to be the blue-and-white saltire, and she was clearly a Russian passenger-liner, two-masted, two-funnelled, though from her funnels came no trace of smoke, and the position of her steam-cones was anywhere.
"Tidy little trade here," commented 'Bias, as they reached the Passage Slip and conned the business reach of the river, the vessels alongside the jetties, the cranes at work, the shipping moored off at the buoys vessels of all nations, but mostly Danes and Russians, awaiting their turn. "Twenty thousand tons a-month, my boy! See that two-funnelled craft 'longside the second jetty?
The picture which then presented itself to his gaze was that of a brilliant morning, with a sky of turquoise blue faintly streaked here and there with the merest suggestion of a few mares' tails, a sea of sapphire blue wrinkling and sparkling under the softest imaginable breathing of a westerly air of wind, the horizon obscured by a thin veil of haze that seemed to be already melting in the warmth of the sun, a great two-funnelled steamer lying motionless about a mile away, with a film of smoke issuing from her funnels and "feathers" of steam trembling at the top of her waste pipes, a whole flotilla of boats pulling slowly and apparently aimlessly hither and thither, and a few masses of ice of varying dimensions, from small fragments of a square foot in area to a great berg fully sixty feet high, thinly dotting the surface of the sea.
As the boat was nearing its pier in the North River a two-funnelled, drab, foreign-looking sea-going steamer was dropping down toward the bay. The boat turned its nose in toward its slip. The steamer veered as if to seek midstream, and then yawed, seemed to increase its speed and struck the Coney boat on the side near the stern, cutting into it with a terrifying shock and crash.
The fleet as a whole now lay broad on our starboard beam, and we in the Kasanumi were crossing the bows of a two-funnelled battleship which, from her position as the outermost ship of the fleet, I knew must be the Tzarevich, when, out of the tail of my eye, so to speak, I again caught the flash of one of our Whiteheads as it leapt outward and plunged into the sea.
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