ss,--when you and she
are young fools and over head and ears in love,--you'll know what I mean,
you boys, when you grow to it, and I am not denying that it brings heaven
down to earth and knocks their heads together. But for bliss--sheer
undiluted bliss--match me the day when a boy runs upstairs and sees his
midshipman's outfit laid out on the bed--blue jacket, brass buttons, dirk,
yes, and in my sea time a kind of top-hat that fined away towards the top,
with a cockade. I tell you I spent an hour looking at myself in my poor
mother's cheval-glass, and then walked out across the common to show
myself to my aunts,--rest their souls!--who inhabited a cottage about a
mile from ours, and had been used hitherto, when entertaining me, to ask
one another in French if the offer of a glass of beer would, considering
my age, be permissible. I drank sherry with them that afternoon, and left
them (I make no doubt) with a kind of tacit assurance that, come what
might, they were henceforward secure of protection.

The next day--though it blew a short squall of tears when I took leave of
my mother and climbed aboard the coach--was scarcely less glorious.
I wore my uniform, and nursed my toasting-fork proudly across my knees;
and the passengers one and all made much of me, in a manner which I never
allowed to derogate into coddling. At The Swan with Two Necks, Cheapside,
when the coach set me down, I behaved as a man should; ordered supper and
a bed; and over my supper discussed the prospects of peace with an
affable, middle-aged bagman who shared my box. He thought well of the
prospects of peace. For me, I knitted my brows and gave him to understand
that circumstances might alter cases.

From The Swan with Two Necks I took coach next morning--proceeding from
the bar to the door between two lines of smiling domestics--and travelled
down to the Blue Posts, the famous Blue Posts, at Portsmouth. In the Blue
Posts there was a smoking-room, and across the end of it ran a sofa on
which (tradition said) you might count on finding a midshipman asleep.
I was not then aware of the tradition; but sure enough a midshipman
reclined there when I entered the room. He was not asleep, but engaged in
perusing something which he promptly, even hastily, stowed away in the
breast of his tunic--a locket, I make no doubt. He sat up and regarded
me; and I stared back at him, how long I will not say, but long enough for
me to perceive that his jacke