"Ah, you should ha seen us. I were in me glory. A bloody massacree, that's what it were. Bloody massacree. Enough to make a blessed saint weep for joy. Pommesoul it were."
He turned in his stride, and the lamp showed the tears dribbling down his face.
"And when we'd mushed up the blanky caboodlum: spiked the guns; sent the gunners to glory; and blow'd up the battery, who led the boys out?"
He stopped dead.
"Old Lush!—Lushy, the Gunner, Gorblessim!" swelling his chest, and patting it. "And why?—because there wasn't a quarter-deck officer, not so much as a middy or mate, left to do it."
He resumed his strut with fighting hands.
"That's our sort aboard the Tremendous, sir. We're the halleloojah lads to fight. And what we are, old Ding-dong made us."
"Who's old Ding-dong?" asked the boy, breathlessly.
The Gunner shot a finger at the block-of-granite figure forward.
"That's the man as won the battle o the Nile," he whispered with husky magnificence. "And ere's the man that elped him."