"Gimme the ruddy things," he muttered, hungrily, and awoke the partially gassed inmates of the Wardroom with a joyous whoop.
"Mail!" he shouted, and dealt the moist envelopes into the laps of the recumbent figures sleeping off the effects of a Christmas luncheon in various attitudes of statuesque abandon.
The Mess awoke bleary-eyed, and fumbled with its correspondence. One by one the forms sat upright; grunts were succeeded by articulate expressions of approval. The Lieutenant (E), who sat nearest the bell, rose to his feet and pressed it fervently. Then he sat down again, ordered a drink, and slit open the first of four fat envelopes. It was from a favourite sister, ætat fourteen, who, having made up her feminine mind that Sir David Beatty's position in the naval cosmos was one that her brother would fill with more picturesque and efficient completeness, speedily surrounded that officer in a comfortable aura of giggling self-complacency.
The Midshipman R.N.R. burst open a bulging envelope and stepped straightway on to a magic carpet, which wafted him out of the steel shell of a Destroyer's Wardroom into a Berkshire vicarage.
The Sub sat on the settee with his legs in heavy leather sea-boots and his elbows on his knees reading a letter from a farm in Northamptonshire. The writer of the letter had spent the morning cleaning out a byre, and the early part of the afternoon sorting potatoes. She had then bathed and sat down in her prettiest crêpe-de-chine kimono and a mingled fragrance of China tea and bath salts to the composition of a letter that spread a slowly widening grin of ecstasy across the weather-beaten features of the recipient, who had almost forgotten what a woman's voice sounded like.
The clouds of tobacco-smoke curled to and fro in the close atmosphere of the Destroyer's Wardroom, and the silence—save for the rustle of a quickly-turned page or the snicker of a knife opening a fresh envelope—was profound. Then the Surgeon Probationer chuckled hoarsely. It was a profane sound and passed unnoticed; but presently he bent forward and thrust a gaudy strip of pasteboard beneath the nose of the enraptured Sub-Lieutenant.
"Call that nuffin'?" he queried, coarsely.
The Sub detached his soul with difficulty from the seventh heaven, and considered a highly-coloured representation of a robin upon a snowy background, and the legend "Peace on earth and goodwill among men" picked out in frosted letters against a border of holly leaves.
"'Snice, ain't it?" said the Surgeon Probationer.
"Fair bit of all-right," said the Sub, good-humouredly, and resumed page seven of the closely scribbled sheet: