"Oranges and lemons," said Georgina promptly, and seized the
Indiarubber Man's hand.
"I don't know the words," replied her partner plaintively; "I only 'knows the toon,'" as the leadsman said to the Navigator.
So the children supplied the words to the men's bass accompaniment; the Captain and his wife linked hands. The candle came to light them to bed; the chopper came to chop off a head; and at the end a grand tug-of-war terminated with two squealing heaps of humanity in miniature subsiding on top of the Young Doctor and the A.P.
Then they played "Hunt the slipper," at which Torps, with his long arms, greatly distinguished himself, and "Hide the thimble," at which Double-O Gerrard, blinking through his glasses straight at the quarry without seeing it, was hopelessly disgraced. "General Post" and "Kiss in the Ring" followed, and quite suddenly the mother of Georgina, Jane, and Cornelius James decreed it was time for bed, and the best game of all began.
The Captain's wife gathered six pairs of vasty pyjamas over her arm. "I'll take the girls all together and look after them in my husband's cabin," she said. "We'll come along when we're ready. Will you all look after the boys?"
Freckles fell to the lot of the Junior Watchkeeper; David, specialist in raspberry puffs, had already attached himself to the Indiarubber Man. The A.P. found himself leading off a young gentleman with an air-gun which he earnestly desired as a bed-fellow. The remaining two, red-headed twins who had spent most of the afternoon locked in combat, were in charge of Torps and the Young Doctor.
"Where's Cornelius James?" asked the First Lieutenant suddenly. "What a day, what a day!" A search party was promptly instituted, and the Captain's son at last discovered forward in the Petty Officers' mess. Here, seated on the knee of Casey, his father's coxswain, he was being regaled with morsels of bloater, levered into his willing mouth on the point of a clasp knife, and washed down by copious draughts of strong tea out of a basin.
"I went to say 'Good night' to Casey," explained the delinquent as he was being led back to civilisation, "and Casey said I ought to be hungry after mustering my bag this afternoon. What does that mean?"
"I shouldn't listen to everything Casey tells you," replied the First
Lieutenant severely.
"That's what daddy says sometimes," observed Cornelius James. "But I like Casey awfully. Better'n Nannie. He taught me how to make a reef-knot, an' I can do semaphore—the whole alphabet . . . nearly."