n't rate any more questions than anybody else here. I'm
telling you the story, and I'll tell all that's good for you and just
the way it happened.

"Now if this yeoman had been better acquainted with his skipper, he'd
have been of some use just then. He might have suggested, in a way any
of us can at times without interfering, or jarring an officer, even as
topsided as a captain, how the thing could be fixed up without any
correspondence game. But this new yeoman hadn't yet learned what his
captain's steaming radius was. And the captain, having regulations on
his brain and not getting the hint at the psychological time, he
dictates a regulation communication to the commandant of the yard, which
the new yeoman frames up just as he was told. It was a letter inquiring
of the commandant the status of the condemned hose in question, and
could it not be loaned for temporary use, to be returned in due
season--say, next day? and so forth.

"Now the commandant was a good old soul, too, and nothing would have
pleased him better than to accommodate his old friend and classmate, the
captain of the _Savannah_; but seeing this thing come to him in such
formal style, and himself being just off a three-years' cruise, and
always a little doubtful about these port regulations, anyway, and
wanting to do things up in a seaman-like way, he turns to his chief
clerk and says, 'What do we do about this?'

"Now what the commandant meant and what he would have said, if he'd put
it in more words, was: 'I want the _Savannah_ to have the use of that
condemned hose, but I suppose there are certain formalities to be
observed, and your business is to know what these formalities are. Here,
you attend to these formalities, but see that the _Savannah_ gets the
use of the hose.' That's about how he would have put it aboard ship, but
he hadn't quite savvied this shore-going chief clerk at his elbow.
Toward him he didn't have that same sea-going feeling that he'd have
toward one of his old ship's crew.

"And the chief clerk wasn't the kind that lost sleep trying to make
trouble for anybody; but he was the combination of being twenty-five
years on one job and having a manager of a wife--an upstanding,
marine-sergeant sort of a woman, with the beam and bows of a battleship,
and an eye--oh, an eye!--and the chief clerk and his missus, they'd just
finished paying for their house over in the city, and they'd had to
scrimp and scrape for the Lord knows how ma