“Here, out of this, my lad!” said he, giving a twist to the swinging concern that landed me on the deck in a twinkling. “You can’t stop there snoozing any longer! Don’t you see the sun is scorching your eyes out?”
He had a good deal of imagination, had that man; for it would have puzzled the ‘Philadelphia lawyer,’ whom father was so fond of quoting, to have discovered the ghost of a ray of sunlight this cold, foggy, February morning at Four Bells!
The rest of the novices—there being, as you know, ten other ‘unclothed’ boys besides myself—had been roughly aroused in like fashion; and to a by-stander all of us must have looked a forlorn lot of shivering creatures, adrift there on the cheerless deck in the half light of early day, not knowing what to do with ourselves until somebody told us what to do and bearing, I fancy, a strikingly strong resemblance to a flock of lambs in some strange pasture deserted by their dams!
I make a mistake there, however, for the muttered growling exclamations I heard uttered by one of the warrant-officers, who came past where we stood clustered together, certainly sounded uncommonly like the name of the lambs’ mothers I have just mentioned, showing that its ‘eidolon’ remained.
The observation made by this officer, who, to my surprise, I subsequently found was the boatswain, brought our old police friend, the master-at-arms, on the scene.
“Here, boys,” said he to us, “you must bestir yourselves, and not stand star-gazing there, like so many country bumpkins at a fair! Tom Bowling, if you’re the son of your father, you ought to know that you’ve got to unsling your hammock when the ‘lash up and stow’ is sounded! And you, too, my Irish-Italian friend over there, roll up your hammock, my lad!”
“Sure, an’ is it manin’ me yez afther?” inquired Mick Donovan, unhitching the lanyard of his hammock from the hook above in a brace of shakes. “Faith, it’s makin’ a rowly-powly puddin’ of it I will, sor, entirely!”
The ‘Jaunty’ grinned at Mick’s naïve remark, but soon mastered the difficulty of teaching us by passing the job on to other hands.
“Ah, perhaps you’d better ‘go through the ropes,’ my lads, properly, and begin at once at your ‘bag and hammock drill,’ as all new boys should; though sometimes, they wait till they get uniforms first,” said he, hailing, as he spoke, one of the first-class boys standing by the police office, detailed to act as messengers, like our friend Larrikins. “Boy, there! See if you can find one of the instructors handy, and tell him, with my compliments, I should like to see him for a minute!”
“Yes, sir,” replied this chap, saluting. “I seed Mister Saunders by the fore-hatchway jist now.”