The operations ashore had taken place rather late in the afternoon, and the sun had already begun to sink in the west when we returned on board the frigate. I had now quite recovered from the effects of my adventure, and was ravenously hungry and thirsty; so after administering some beef-tea to Charlie, I repaired to the gunroom to get some tea, during which meal I had to relate over and over again to those of my messmates who had been debarred from joining the expedition the story of our hairbreadth escape.
“We had a mild kind of excitement while the landing-party was ashore,” observed one of my brother-middies, as he looked disconsolately into a nearly empty pot of marmalade.
“What was that?” I asked, hacking away viciously at a huge loaf. “I suppose you had a rat hunt in the bread-room with the commander’s dog and the ship’s cat.”
“It would have been a case of ‘the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat,’ I should say, if we had gone in for that sort of sport,” answered my messmate laughingly.—“Steward, bring me a pot of strawberry jam.”
“Well, don’t keep me in suspense any longer,” I said impatiently, “or you’ll take all my appetite away; honour bright.”
“Darcy’s off his feed, you fellows!” shouted my teasing brother-middy, whose name was Fitzgerald; “and I can positively count his ribs through his waistcoat.—Steward, bring a soup-tureen of oatmeal porridge in this direction and a few gallons of buttermilk, for there’s a young gentleman here at the last gasp for want of nourishment.”
The steward at this moment entered the mess with the pot of strawberry jam which had been ordered; but before he could deposit it upon the table in front of Fitzgerald, I had snatched it from the tray and placed it by the side of my own plate. Then seizing a large table-spoon, and without even looking at the rightful owner of the preserve, I made a pretence of digging out an enormous spoonful of it for my own special gratification.
“O you greedy beggar!” shouted Fitzgerald, starting up and trying to snatch his property from me. “Even if you were more like a skeleton than you are, you’ve no business to grub away at another fellow’s jam like that.”
But I put one firm hand upon the jam-pot, and waved him away with the other which held the spoon.
“Spin your yarn and eat your jam, or hold your tongue and see it go into my capacious maw,” I said, grinning at him. “You pay your money and take your choice, old man.”