“I’ll be hanged if I know!”
“Then, d’ye see, you’ve no departure to work from. However, I think you cannot have been in the service at that time. We were not quite so particular about uniform as we are now.”
“Then I think the service was all the better for it. Now-a-days, in your crack ships, a mate has to go down in the hold or spirit-room, and after whipping up fifty empty casks, and breaking out twenty full ones, he is expected to come on quarter-deck as clean as if he was just come out of a band-box.”
“Well, there’s plenty of water alongside, as far as the outward man goes, and iron dust is soon brushed off. However, as you say, perhaps a little too much is expected; at least, in five of the ships in which I was first-lieutenant, the captain was always hauling me over the coals about the midshipmen not dressing properly, as if I was their dry-nurse. I wonder what Captain Prigg would have said if he had seen such a turn-out as you, Mr Smith, on his quarter-deck.”
“I should have had one turn-out more,” drawled Smith.
“With your out-at-elbows jacket, there, eh!” continued Mr Appleboy.
Smith turned up his elbows, looked at one and then at the other; after so fatiguing an operation, he was silent.
“Well, where was I? Oh! It was about ninety-three or ninety-four, as I said that it happened—Tomkins, fill your glass and hand me the sugar—how do I get on? This is Number 15,” said Appleboy, counting some white lines on the table by him; and taking up a piece of chalk, he marked one more line on his tally. “I don’t think this is so good a tub as the last, Tomkins, there’s a twang about it—a want of juniper; however, I hope, we shall have better luck this time. Of course you know we sail to-morrow?”
“I presume so, by the leg of mutton coming on board.”
“True—true; I’m regular—as clock-work. After being twenty years a first-lieutenant one gets a little method. I like regularity. Now the admiral has never omitted asking me to dinner once, every time I have come into harbour, except this time. I was so certain of it, that I never expected to sail; and I have but two shirts clean in consequence.”