. At the same time every one acknowledged his
correct behaviour in every point, his sense of justice, his forbearance,
his kindness, and his good sense. With him life was indeed a
pilgrimage, and he wended his way in all Christian charity and all
Christian zeal.

In all societies, however small they may be, provided that they do but
amount to half a dozen, you will invariably meet with a bully. And it
is also generally the case that you will find one of that society who is
more or less the butt. You will discover this even in occasional
meetings, such as a dinner-party, the major part of which have never met
before.

Previous to the removal of the cloth, the bully will have shown himself
by his dictatorial manner, and will also have selected the one upon whom
he imagines that he can best practise. In a midshipman's berth this
fact has become almost proverbial, although now perhaps it is not
attended with that disagreeable despotism which was permitted at the
time that our hero entered the service.

The bully of the midshipman's berth of H.M. sloop _Harpy_ was a young
man about seventeen, with light, curly hair, and florid countenance, the
son of the clerk in the dockyard at Plymouth, and his name was Vigors.

The butt was a pudding-face Tartar-physiognomied boy of fifteen, whose
intellects, with fostering, if not great, might at least have been
respectable, had he not lost all confidence in his own powers from the
constant jeers and mockeries of those who had a greater fluency of
speech without perhaps so much real power of mind. Although slow, what
he learned he invariably retained. This lad's name was Gossett. His
father was a wealthy yeoman of Lynn, in Norfolk. There were at the time
but three other midshipmen in the ship, of whom it can only be said that
they were like midshipmen in general, with little appetite for learning,
but good appetites for dinner, hating everything like work, fond of
everything like fun, fighting _a l'outrance_ one minute, and sworn
friends the next--with general principles of honour and justice, but
which were occasionally warped according to circumstances; with all the
virtues and vices so heterogeneously jumbled and heaped together, that
it was almost impossible to ascribe any action to its true motive, and
to ascertain to what point their vice was softened down into almost a
virtue, and their virtues from mere excess degenerated into vice. Their
names were O'Connor, Mills,