swiftly to unlace the sub’s boots and fetch his slippers.

To every dog his day.

Random memories such as these necessarily present individuals and incidents, not in the sequence of their importance in the cosmos as one sees it now, but as they appeared to the vision of the Naval Cadet, whose world was an amiable Chaos.

Thus the Captain flickers through this kaleidoscope an awesome bearded figure, infinitely remote from the small affairs of that teeming rabbit-warren of youth. More readily comes to mind the picture of his lady wife, white-haired, with clear eyes and gentle voice, a memory somehow entangled with geraniums in red pots about the moulded stern-gallery and tea on Sunday afternoons in the spacious chintz-draped after-cabin: with irksome football sprains, and brief{40} puerile illnesses made more endurable by her visits to the cotside.

{40}

The Commander, though less awesome than the Captain, approached the mortal in that he stooped at times to wrath. His was the cold eye before which the more hardened malefactors quailed; his the rasping voice that jerked the four terms to attention at Divisions each morning:

“Young Gentlemen, ’shun!”

The English public schoolboy is conscious of youth, and takes the fact of being a gentleman for granted. But to hear himself addressed by a designation that combined both qualities was a never-staling subject for inward mirth and a weird self-congratulation difficult of analysis. It conveyed a hint of coming manhood and responsibilities: it was the voice of the Navy, bending on the leading strings, heard for the first time.

But on a plane far nearer earth stood the Term Lieutenants, each one the god and hero, the Big Brother of his term. That they, their Boxer or South African medal ribbons, their tattoo-marks, County or International caps, biceps, and all the things that were theirs, were the objects of their respective Terms’ slavish adulation, goes without saying. Bloody encounters between their self-appointed champions over an adverse criticism or doubt{41} cast upon a forgotten word were not unknown. Two entire terms once joined battle and bled each other’s noses the length and breadth of the echoing “Skipper Woods” to clinch some far-flung argument as to the merits of their respective “Loots.”

{41}

There were but four Term Lieutenants, and they were picked 

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