“The ossifers, in course, he couldn’t sarve out in the same way, not being allowed for to do so by the laws of the service, sir; but he’d court-martial ’em, sir, as many on ’em as would give him arf a chance, and the court-martial gun used for to fire in his time here as reg’lar as clock-work every mornin’ at eight, winter and summer alike, jest the same as when the flag’s h’isted at sunrise, yezsir!”
“What an old martinet he must have been!” I said in response to this. “Perhaps, though, the poor old admiral suffered from bad health, and that made him cross and easily put out?”
“Bad health, sir? Not a bit of it!” exclaimed my friend, the waiter, repudiating such an excuse with scorn. “It were bad temper as were his complaint.
“Lord-sakes, though, sir, he were bad all over, was Sir Titus; ay, that he were, from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot. As bad as they makes ’em!
“W’y, he ’ad the temper, sir, of old Nick hisself, ay, that he had!
“I don’t mean the Czar of Roosia, sir. Don’t you run away with that there notion! No, sir, I means the rale old gent as ye’ve heerd tell on, wot hangs out down below when he’s at home and allers dresses in black to look genteel-like. Wears top-boots for to hide his cloven feet, sir, and carries a fine tail under his arm with a fluke at the end of it, same as that on a sheet-anchor—ah, yer knows the gent I means, sir!
“Well, yezsir, old Sir Titus wer him all over and must ha’ been his twin-brother; barring the tail, the admiral being shaky about the feet, too, and his boots a’most as big as the dinghy of that sloop. They wos like as two peas, sir, old Nick and he!
“Lord-sakes, though, yer must have heerd tell of him, sir, a young and gallant naval ossifer like yerself, ’specially that yarn consarnin’ him and the washerwoman as was going into the dockyard one mornin’ when he were a-spyin’ round the gates?”
“No, waiter, I never heard the old gentleman’s name before you told it me,” I replied, curious to learn some further disclosures concerning so celebrated a character. “What was this story?”
“W’y, sir, it’s enuff a’most for to make a cat laugh, sir,” he said with a snigger, which he immediately flicked away, as it were, with his napkin, resuming his whilom solemn demeanour. “It happen’d, if yer must know, sir, in this way, sir, yezsir.