the world over, but a new beaver hat couldn't be
bought for ten shillings. Everything must have a beginning, of course,
but the gentleman below was annoyed, and threatened to come upstairs.
It wasn't perhaps exactly the thing to come to the Port Admiral's ears:
but if we left it to _him_ (the waiter) he had a notion that ten
shillings, with a little tact, might clear it, and no bones broken.

Hartnoll, somewhat white in the face, tendered the sum, and very pluckily
declined to let me bear my share. "You'll excuse me, Rodd," said he
politely, "but I must make it a point of honour." Pale though he was, I
believe he would have offered to fight me had I insisted.

Our instructions, it turned out, were identical. We were to be called for
at the Blue Posts, and a boat would fetch us off to the _Melpomene_
frigate. Her captain, it appeared, was a kind of second cousin of
Hartnoll's: for me, I had been recommended to him by a cousin of my
father's, a member of the Board of Admiralty. Captain the Hon. John
Suckling treated us, nearly or remotely as we might be connected with him,
with impartiality that night. No boat came off for us. We learned that
the _Melpomene_ was lying at Spithead, waiting (so the waiter told us) to
carry out a new Governor with his suite to Barbados; which possibly
accounted for her captain's neglect of such small fry as two midshipmen.
The waiter, however, advised us not to trouble ourselves. He would make
it all right in the morning.

So Hartnoll and I supped together in the empty coffee-room; compared
notes; drank a pint of port apiece; and under its influence became
boastful. Insensibly the adventure of the beaver hat came to wear the
aspect of a dashing practical joke. It encouraged us to exchange
confidences of earlier deeds of derring-do, of bird-nesting, of
rook-shooting, of angling for trout, of encounters with poachers.
I remember crossing my knees, holding up my glass to the light, and
remarking sagely that some poachers were not at all bad fellows.
Hartnoll agreed that it depended how you took 'em. We lauded Norfolk and
Devon as sporting counties, and somehow it was understood that they
respectively owed much of their reputation to the families of Hartnoll and
Rodd. Hartnoll even hinted at a love-affair: but here I discouraged him
with a frown, which implied that as seamen we saw that weakness in its
proper light. I have wondered, since then, to what extent we imposed upon
on