"Just shave Finisterre, won't we, sir?"
"Just shave it! why, we can walk ten miles to windward of it."
"Well, the Gurnet is a beauty anyhow, I will admit that; but still, sir—"
"Look here, doctor: come down below and dine with me—eh?—and we'll have a jolly good talk, and leave service alone; shan't we?"
This was a very pretty way of telling the doctor to mind his own business; and he wisely took the hint, and went off down below to put on his mess-jacket.
The good fellow, however, was not altogether easy in his mind. He did not like the look of the glass, nor—as he told the lieutenant, whom he met as he passed through the ward-room to reach his cabin—the look of things in general. The clouds this evening were racing across the sky, although it was now almost too dark to see them; the wind was unsteady, though very high; and there was a jerkiness in the motion of the brave little ship that Dr. Reikie did not half like.
Lieutenant Sturdy was putting on an oilskin coat and a sou'-wester. He was a rough-looking sea-dog at the best, but arrayed in this style, his round, red, clean-shaven face smiling rather grimly as the doctor spoke to him, he looked more like a North Sea pilot than the first officer of a British man-of-war.
Sturdy was a year or two older than the captain, but he had no great friends at head-quarters, nor anywhere else for the matter of that. He came of a good, honest Newcastle family. His father owned quite a small fleet of coal-steamers that plied between that great city of the north and London or elsewhere. In fact, these coal-ships coasted everywhere, going high up as far as Aberdeen, and south even to Plymouth itself.
There was a larger steamer in which, being fond of the sea, Mr. Sturdy, senior, had himself coasted for years. His wife was a tiny, delicate bit of a body, and feared to venture much upon the ocean; but Lieutenant Ben Sturdy here had sailed with his father from the time when he was hardly as tall as the binnacle. It was a rough kind of a school to learn in, but it made him a sailor, and even in the royal navy an officer is none the worse of being a sailor. What do you think, reader?
Well, Sturdy had entered the service before he was fourteen, and had not been a deal on shore in England since, because he had no interest to get him nice ships that had only a three years' commission. Sturdy's ships had mostly been rotten old tubs that were kept on a station may be for five years and then recommissioned, two or three of the officers being left out in them, perhaps. So you see the service is not all a bed of roses, but it is the best service in the world for all that. An old sailor like myself may be excused for thinking so, at all events.