ough,
a sad affair. We've lost Bitpin and Stormcock and Morgan and that poor
lad Jackson amongst the officers killed, besides those wounded, and I
can't say yet how many men, but between thirty and forty, I fear!"

"Yes, sir, it is a bad job," replied the commander, bending his head and
looking grave for an instant, but the next moment a bright look came in
his face and he shook his fist at the distant forts; "but we'll pay you
out yet, pigtails and all, for this day's work!"

"Let us hope so," said the captain, as he crossed the quarter-deck and
disappeared from view beneath the break of the poop, going into his own
cabin to send in his report to our senior officer, Admiral Hope, who was
subsequently invalided home, being so dangerously wounded as to be
incapable of attending to any other business after forwarding his
dispatches home. "And, the sooner the better, Nesbitt--the sooner the
better!" Both officers judged the feeling of their countrymen well, but
quite twelve months elapsed before all our preparations were completed
for retaliating on the Chinese and proving to them, in that forcible
mode which seemingly only appealed to their reason, that "the worst
piece of work they ever did in their lives was to tread on the tail of
the British lion," as Doctor Nettleby observed to Mr Jellaby in my
hearing later on the same day.

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE.

A GOOD "DEAL."

In the meantime, the fleet sailed away from the scene of action, after
honourably burying the dead and destroying our sunken vessels; so that
the Chinese, who had a weak habit at that time and in later years, too,
of indulging in fiction when referring to their martial exploits, should
not be able to boast of having captured our ships, the _Candahar_
putting in at Hong Kong to refit later on, after visiting Shanghai again
on leaving the Gulf of Pechili.

Here Larkyns, who had succeeded poor Mr Stormcock in his office as
caterer of the gunroom mess, distinguished himself, quite unwittingly,
in a financial operation which gained him the credit of being a very
"smart" fellow indeed in the sense in which our American cousins use the
term; besides earning for himself the good opinion of all of us in the
gunroom, whom he benefited by the exploit.

It happened in this wise.

Master Larkyns being ashore one day at Victoria, the chief town of Hong
Kong, which is built up the side of a hill facing the harbour, noticing
a lot of people collected round