I remarked on the fact that, in spite of the heavy wind, our basket was riding more steadily than that of any stationary observation balloon I had ever been up in at the front. "It 'yaws' a bit," I observed, "but I have never been up in a balloon with less of that 'jig-a-jig' movement which makes it so hard to fix an object with your glasses."
"The latest 'stabilisers' have just about eliminated the troublesome 'jig-a-jig,'" replied my companion.
He turned to me with a grin. "You're in luck," he said. "Ship's heading up into the wind to let a seaplane go just as they're ready to wind us in. You'll learn, now, why they call one of these balloons a 'kite.' There they go! Hold fast!"
There was a sudden side-winding jerk, and then that perfectly good seascape—Grand Fleet, Orkneys, the north end of Scotland, and all—was hashed up into something full of zigzag lines like a Futuristic masterpiece or the latest thing in "scientific camouflaging." My friends on the deck told me, afterwards, that the basket did not "loop-the-loop," that it did not "jump through," "lie down," and "roll over" like a "clown" terrier in a circus; but how could they, who were a thousand feet away, know better than I, who was on the spot? When I put that poser to them, however, one of them replied that it was because they had their eyes open. The only sympathetic witness I found was one who admitted that, while the "kite" itself behaved with a good deal of dignity, the basket did perform some evolutions not unremotely suggestive of a canvas water-bucket swung on the end of a rope by a sailor in a hurry for his morning "souse."
[COALING THE GRAND FLEET]
A signal came one morning, ordering the Grand Fleet to prepare to proceed to sea, and, almost as though the sparks of the wireless that caught the winged word had themselves lighted the laid and waiting fires, wreaths and coils of smoke began crowning some scores of towering funnels which a few moments before had loomed only in gaunt silhouette against the round snow-clad hillsides which ring the Northern Base.
Presently a dust-begrimed collier shook herself free from the moorings which held her to one of the battleships, and, floundering nervously as though anxious to get out of the way as quickly as possible, nosed off into the sooty wakes of three of her untidy sisters who had been coaling the other ships of the division.