Chapter Three.
I am made to look very blue at the Blue Posts—Find wild spirits around, and, soon after, hot spirits within me; at length my spirits overcome me—Call to pay my respects to the Captain, and find that I had had the pleasure of meeting him before—No sooner out of one scrape than into another.
When we stopped, I enquired of the coachman which was the best inn. He answered that “it was the Blue Postesses, where the midshipmen leave their chestesses, call for tea and toastesses, and sometimes forget to pay for their breakfastesses.” He laughed when he said it, and I thought that he was joking with me; but he pointed out two, large blue posts at the door next the coach-office, and told me that all the midshipmen resorted to that hotel. The coffee-room was full of midshipmen, and, as I was anxious about my chest, I enquired of one of them if he knew when the waggon would come in.
“Do you expect your mother by it?” replied he.
“O no! but I expect my uniforms—I only wear these bottle-greens until they come.”
“And pray what ship are you going to join?”
“The Die-a-maid—Captain Thomas Kirkwall Savage.”
“The Diomede—I say, Robinson, a’n’t that the frigate in which the midshipmen had four dozen apiece for not having pipe-clayed their weekly accounts on the Saturday?”