“Ah! that is just what there should be,” said Jack. “It is the very thing that keeps England so well together. When the gentle born you speak of find that the sons of city men are as gentlemanly, as clever, and as honourable as themselves, and can play cricket or leapfrog, or anything of that sort, perhaps better than they do, they learn to respect them, and treat them as their equals ever afterwards. That is one of the very things that made our school so good. We used to think of fellows not for what they were but for what they did—except, perhaps, a few miserable sneaks, who ‘carnied’ up to a fellow because he had a handle to his name.”
Pigeon did not respond to this sentiment, because he had been noted far doing the very thing that Jack reprobated.
Jack could not help describing Pigeon in the berth, and the general opinion was that he deserved to be well roasted while he remained on board—in other words, that he should be made the common butt, at which the shafts of their wits should be aimed.
They had plenty of opportunities of shooting the said shafts, for Pigeon exhibited an almost incredible amount of simplicity in all things connected with the sea. I do not mean to say, for one moment, that they were right in playing off their jokes on Pigeon. I have an especial dislike to practical jokes; and those I have generally seen carried out have been decidedly wrong, and very senseless and stupid, without a particle of wit.
They had not been long at sea when one night Pigeon was encountered walking the deck, and every now and then stopping and looking eagerly over the side.
“What do you see there?” asked Jack. “Anything out of the common way?”
“All those sparkles, what can they be?” exclaimed Pigeon, pointing to the flashes of phosphorescent light which played among the foam dashed off from the sides, and which were seen in the wake of the vessel.
Hemming came by at the moment. He had taken an especial dislike to the bully. “Those sparkles! don’t you know what they are? I thought everybody did,” he observed, in a tone of contempt. “Well, there’s a Russian fleet just gone up through the Straits, and every man, woman, and child aboard them smokes, from the admiral to the admiral’s baby, and those are the ashes out of their pipes and off the ends of their cigars. Why, that’s nothing to what you sometimes see. If we were close in their wake, there would be light enough for us to see to steer by.”
“Law, you don’t say so!” exclaimed Pigeon. “I should have thought the water would have put them out.”
“Not down in these latitudes. It’s too warm for that,” answered Hemming gravely.