I replied, delightedly, that nothing could possibly suit me better; that I was inexpressibly grateful for the confidence he was about to repose in me, and that I would leave nothing undone to prove that such confidence was justified.
“Very well, then, that is settled,” observed the admiral genially. “We will have the schooner overhauled at once, and made ready for sea as quickly as may be. Then you can go to sea for a month; there will be an examination next month, for which you must arrange to be in port, and then—having passed, as I feel certain you will—you shall have your commission, and be off to sea again to win your next step.”
Chapter Eight.
We capture a Spanish indiaman.
The schooner was turned over to the dockyard people that same afternoon, and duly surveyed; and on the following day, when I presented myself at the admiral’s office, the old boy handed me a list, as long as the main bowline, setting forth the several alterations deemed necessary to fit the little craft for His Majesty’s service.
“Here, Mr Courtenay, just run your eye over that list, and tell me what you think of it,” he cried, as he passed it to me across the table.
I “ran my eye over it.”
“New gang of rigging fore and aft—new bulwarks, six feet high, fitted with hammock rail, etcetera, complete—deck strengthened by doubling the deck-beams—new coamings to hatchways,”—and so on, and so on, until my imagination had conjured up a picture of the trim little Susanne transmogrified out of recognition, and so stiffened and hampered by her extra deck-beams and new rigging, that we should have reason to deem ourselves fortunate should we ever succeed in screwing six knots out of her on a bowline.