eal more
than that. Thousands of men threaten, and do nothing, according to the
proverb. A still more important point is--how did the muskets in the
boat come home? They were all returned to the station, I presume. Were
they all returned with their charges in them?"

"I am sure I can not say how that was. There was nobody to attend to
that. But one of them had been lost altogether."

"One of the guns never came back at all!" Mordacks almost shouted.
"Whose gun was it that did not come back?"

"How can we say? There was such confusion. My husband would never let
them nick the guns, as they do at some of the stations, for every man
to know his own. But in spite of that, each man had his own, I believe.
Cadman declares that he brought home his; and nobody contradicted him.
But if I saw the guns, I should know whether Cadman's is among them."

"How can you possibly pretend to know that, ma'am? English ladies can do
almost anything. But surely you never served out the guns?"

"No, Mr. Mordacks. But I have cleaned them. Not the inside, of course;
that I know nothing of; and nobody sees that, to be offended. But
several times I have observed, at the station, a disgraceful quantity
of dust upon the guns--dust and rust and miserable blotches, such as bad
girls leave in the top of a fish-kettle; and I made Charley bring them
down, and be sure to have them empty; because they were so unlike what
I have seen on board of the ship where he won his glory, and took the
bullet in his nineteenth rib."

"My dear madam, what a frame he must have had! But this is most
instructive. No wonder Geraldine is brave. What a worthy wife for a
naval hero! A lady who could handle guns!"

"I knew, sir, quite from early years, having lived near a very large
arsenal, that nothing can make a gun go off unless there is something
in it. And I could trust my husband to see to that; and before I touched
one of them I made him put a brimstone match to the touch-hole. And
I found it so pleasant to polish them, from having such wicked things
quite at my mercy. The wood was what I noticed most, because of
understanding chairs. One of them had a very curious tangle of veins
on the left cheek behind the trigger; and I just had been doing for the
children's tea what they call 'crinkly-crankly'--treacle trickled (like
a maze) upon the bread; and Tommy said, 'Look here! it is the very same
upon this gun.' And so it was; just the same pattern on the wood! And