"Mind, Johnnie," she cried, "to bring me home somefing very nice, and don't fo'get to kill lots and lots of dead sailors."
* * * * *
There was no naval instructor on board the Gurnet, of course; but Jack determined to study, nevertheless, theoretically as well as practically. Well, he found himself among good friends, always willing to help him out of a hole. There were the doctor and second master down below, and there was Lieutenant Sturdy, his sea-dad, on deck, and the rough but kindly bos'n forward.
Mr. Fitzgerald, the senior midshipman, was a tall, lanky young fellow, the younger son of a lord, and though no doubt clever enough after a fashion, he did not see the fun, he said, of studying anything in particular. "Zeal for the service!" he told Sturdy once; "I haven't got any. There is no extra screw for that; and if my brother dies, I shall go on shore and keep my hunters."
Mr. Gribble, the assistant-paymaster, was the tease of the mess. He could sing a rattling good comic song, however, and spin good yarns—all true, he said, because he himself had made them up. So he was rather a favourite in the little mess.
On the whole, the members of the ward-room mess were fairly well met, and lived as jolly a life as the same number of young fellows could live anywhere.
From Gibraltar they went cruising away down the Mediterranean, for the Gurnet carried important dispatches for Malta. They were not put in quarantine here. They just escaped that, having been detained at sea by contrary winds. Yes, they might have steamed; but Captain Gillespie's orders had been to save coals if possible, and never to light fires if there was wind enough to carry the ship along.
At Malta, then, much to his delight, Jack got on shore. The doctor, who was assistant-surgeon in charge, and could do very much as he liked, took Jack with him.
What long letters our little hero had to write about this strange town, with its streets of stairs, its quaintly-dressed inhabitants, its bumboat men and women, its churches, with bells that jangle-jangled on for ever and ever; its bazaars and fortifications and ships, and its hill, or rather brae, on which a wood was said to exist. Dr. Reikie went to this wood on a butterfly expedition, and in search of fossils. Well, the wood itself seemed a fossil, a most forlorn and dilapidated belt of trees indeed. But the doctor and Jack came back laden with specimens, white with dust, and with faces that seemed to have been rubbed with a wet brick.
The only thing worth seeing about Malta, said Lord Tomfoozle, as the doctor called Fitzgerald, the senior mid, was the opera. So he did not miss that for a single night of the ten days the Gurnet lay in Malta. I fear that in one respect Fitzgerald rather gave himself away, as the Yankees express it; for he assured everybody before coming to Malta that he could speak Italian. Well, when he aired this language for the first time at a good hotel kept by a native of sunny Italia, the landlord shrugged his shoulders and shook his head.