Chapter Two.
Don the True Blue—Romance of the Sea—Larry and his Wife.
My uniform was to be made at Portsmouth. Of course I felt myself not a little important, and very fine, as I put it on for, the first time, and looked at myself in the glass, with my dirk buckled to my side, and a round hat with a cockade in it on my head. We were sitting in the coffee-room, waiting for dinner, on that eventful day, when a number of youngsters belonging to a line-of-battle ship came into the inn. They had not been there long, when the shiny look of my new clothes, and the way I kept handling my dirk, unable to help looking down at it, attracted the attention of one of them.
“That’s a sucking Nelson,” he exclaimed, “I’ll bet a sixpence!”
“Hillo, youngster! to what ship do you belong?” asked another, looking hard at me.
“To the Serpent cutter,” I answered, not quite liking the tone in which he spoke.
“And so you are a cutter’s midshipman, are you?” he asked. “And how is it you are not on board, I should like to know?”
I told him that the cutter was away, and that I was waiting for her return.
“Then I presume that you haven’t been to sea at all yet?” observed the first who had spoken, in a bland tone, winking at his shipmates, with the intention of trotting me out.
I answered simply that I had not. Larry, I must observe, all the time was sitting silent, and pretending not to take any notice of them, so that they did not suspect we belonged to each other.