n tow--it resembled nothing so
much as a mahogany coffin--and attached her to the _Vesuvius's_ stern
by a kind of shoreline. This done, the officer in charge presented
himself on board with the clockwork under his arm, and in his hand a
letter for Captain Crang, the first result of which was an order to
dress ship. Within half an hour the _Vesuvius's_ crew had adorned
her from bowsprit to trucks and from trucks to stern with bunting, as
if for a Birthday; though, as Mr. Jope observed, with a glance at the
catamaran astern, the preparations pointed rather to a funeral.
Mr. Jope, as third officer of the ship, betrayed some soreness that
his two superiors had not taken him into their confidence.

At eleven o'clock Captain Crang and Mr. Wapshott appeared on the poop
in full uniform, and a further order was issued to load the guns
blank for a salute.

Hitherto the Major had been but an idler about deck; but finding the
crew of a gun short-handed, he volunteered his services, and was
immersed in the business of loading when a hand clapped him on the
shoulder. Turning, he confronted the boatswain.

"And you go for to pretend for to tell me," said Mr. Jope
reproachfully, "that you're a amachoor!"

The Major was about to explain that as an officer of artillery he
understood the working of a gun, when a loud banging from the town
drew all eyes shoreward; and presently Captain Crang, who had been
gazing in that direction through his glass, called to Mr. Wapshott,
who in turn shouted an order to man the yards.

As this was an order which the Major neither understood nor, had he
understood it, could comply with, he remained on deck while the
sailors swarmed aloft and disposed themselves in attitudes the mere
sight of which turned him giddy, so wantonly precarious they seemed.

The strains of the National Anthem from a distant key-bugle drew his
eyes shoreward again, and between the moored ships he descried a
white-painted gig approaching, manned by twenty oars and carrying an
enormous flag on a staff astern--the Royal Standard of England.

Not until the gig, fetching a long sweep, had made a half-circuit of
the _Vesuvius_ and fallen alongside her accommodation-ladder did the
Major comprehend. Captain Crang, with Mr. Wapshott behind him, had
stepped down the ladder and stood at the foot of it reverently
lifting his cocked hat.

That rotund, star-bedecked figure in the stern sheet, beside the Port
Admiral--that classic b