"Back in the pocket again," said Denman to Florrie. "What on earth can they be driving at?"
"And why," she answered, with another query, "did they go to all that trouble to be so polite and nice, when, as you say, they are fully committed to piracy, and robbed the other vessels by force?"
"This seems to show," he said, "the master hand of Jenkins, who is a natural-born gentleman, as against the work of Forsythe, who is a natural-born brute."
"Yet he is a high-school graduate."
"And Jenkins is a passed seaman apprentice."
"What is that?"
"One who enters the navy at about fifteen or sixteen to serve until he is twenty-one, then to leave the navy or reënlist. They seldom reënlist, for they are trained, tutored, and disciplined into good workmen, to whom shore life offers better opportunities. Those who do reënlist have raised the standard of the navy sailor to the highest in the world; but those that don't are a sad loss to the navy. Jenkins reënlisted. So did Forsythe."
"But do you think the training and tutoring that Jenkins received equal to an education like Forsythe's—or yours?"
"They learn more facts," answered Denman. "The training makes a man of a bad boy, and a gentleman of a good one. What a ghastly pity that, because of conservatism and politics, all this splendid material for officers should go to waste, and the appointments to Annapolis be given to good high-school scholars, who might be cowardly sissies at heart, or blackguards like Forsythe!"
"But that is how you received your appointment, Billie Denman," said the girl, warmly; "and you are neither a sissy nor a blackguard."