post the fat,
red-liveried porter who was looking down on the veteran from the top of
the stairway, regarding that pampered menial as the cause and occasion
of the slight of which he complained. "Never mind, though, Admiral! you
can well afford to treat their mean conduct with the contempt it
deserves; for everybody whose opinion is worth anything knows that Sir
Charles Napier won his laurels as a brave and skilful commander long
before the Reform Club was founded or the Crimean war thought of.
Believe me, sir, history will yet do you justice."

"Ay! when I've gone to my last muster," growled out the old fellow
huskily, in a sad tone, which sent a responsive chill to my heart.
"But, that won't be your fault, Vernon. Thank you, my lad, I know
you're not talking soft solder, so as to get to wind'ard of me, like
those fellows in there. Longshore lubbers like those never recollect
what a man may have done for his country in times gone by. They live
only in the present; and, if a chap chances to make a mistake, as the
best of us will sometimes, they fall on him like a pack of curs on a
rat, and worry him to death, by George!"

"The idle gossip of the clubs need not affect you, sir," replied my
father consolingly. "Not a man in England of any sense is ignorant of
the fact that it is none of your fault that the Baltic Fleet was sent
out on a wild-goose chase and failed to capture Cronstadt and annihilate
the Russian ships inside that stronghold; though, I believe, you would
have astonished old Nick if you had been allowed a free hand!"

"Humph! I don't know about that, Vernon, but I'd have tried to," said
the Admiral, smiling. The next minute, however, he knit his shaggy
eyebrows and looked so fierce that the thought occurred to me that I
would not have liked just then to be in the position of defaulter
brought up before him on his quarter-deck and awaiting condign
punishment; for, he went on growling away angrily, as the recollections
of the past surged up in his mind. "By George! it makes my blood boil,
Vernon, as I think of it now. How could I succeed out there when those
nincompoops at home in the Ministry did not want me to do anything but
play their miserable shilly-shally game of drifting with the tide and
doing nothing! I was told I wasn't to do this and I wasn't to do that,
while all the time that cute old fox the Czar Nicholas was completing
his preparations. Why, would you believe it, Vernon, there was