It was the Cape winter when I joined the gunboat. The hills were covered with purple and green, the air was deliciously cool, and the far-away mountain-tops were clad in virgin snow. It was twelve o’clock noon when I took my traps on board, and found my new messmates seated around the table at tiffin. The gunroom, called the wardroom by courtesy—for the after cabin was occupied by the lieutenant commanding—was a little morsel of an apartment, which the table and five cane-bottomed chairs entirely filled. The officers were five—namely, a little round-faced, dimple-cheeked, good-natured fellow, who was our second-master; a tall and rather awkward-looking young gentleman, our midshipman; a lean, pert, and withal diminutive youth, brimful of his own importance, our assistant-paymaster; a fair-haired, bright-eyed, laughing boy from Cornwall, our sub-lieutenant; and a “wee wee man,” dapper, clean, and tidy, our engineer, admitted to this mess because he was so thorough an exception to his class, which is celebrated more for the unctuosity of its outer than for the smoothness of its inner man.
“Come along, old fellow,” said our navigator, addressing me as I entered the messroom, bobbing and bowing to evade fracture of the cranium by coming into collision with the transverse beams of the deck above—“come along and join us, we don’t dine till four.”
“And precious little to dine upon,” said the officer on his right.
“Steward, let us have the rum,” (Note 1) cried the first speaker.
And thus addressed, the steward shuffled in, bearing in his hand a black bottle, and apparently in imminent danger of choking himself on a large mouthful of bread and butter. This functionary’s dress was remarkable rather for its simplicity than its purity, consisting merely of a pair of dirty canvas pants, a pair of purser’s shoes—innocent as yet of blacking—and a greasy flannel shirt. But, indeed, uniform seemed to be the exception, and not the rule, of the mess, for, while one wore a blue serge jacket, another was arrayed in white linen, and the rest had neither jacket nor vest.
The table was guiltless of a cloth, and littered with beer-bottles, biscuits, onions, sardines, and pats of butter.
“Look out there, Waddles!” exclaimed the sub-lieutenant; “that beggar Dawson is having his own whack o’ grog and everybody else’s.”
“Dang it! I’ll have my tot to-day, I know,” said the assistant-paymaster, snatching the bottle from Dawson, and helping himself to a very liberal allowance of the ruby fluid.
“What a cheek the fellow’s got!” cried the midshipman, snatching the glass from the table and bolting the contents at a gulp, adding, with a gasp of satisfaction as he put down the empty tumbler, “The chap thinks nobody’s got a soul to be saved but himself.”
“Soul or no soul,” replied the youthful man of money as he gazed disconsolately at the empty glass, “my spirit’s gone.”