“thrusters” in the surging crowd of memories of the old Britannia days. Harker, with his piercing, rather melancholy eyes, his black beard and tattooed wrists, and his air of implacable ferocity that for months succeeded in concealing from his term a heart as tender as a woman’s.

His name was not actually Harker, of course; but he is probably still alive, and even retired chief petty officers of the Royal Navy have their susceptibilities. He was a term C.P.O.—mentor, wet-nurse, “sea-daddy,” the outward and visible embodiment of Naval Discipline to sixty-odd naval cadets who yesterday were raw schoolboys and to-day wear the King’s uniform and eke brass buttons—a transition unhinging enough to more matured souls than those of his charges.

How he succeeded in conveying within the space of the first evening the exceedingly unfamiliar routine of training-ship life, the art of turning into a hammock, the necessity for keeping their chests locked, the majesty of the term lieutenant and the omnipotence of the chief cadet captains, to sixty bewildered fifteen-year-olds, only he knows.{25}

{25}

Yet he harried none; they were conscious of him as a flock of disconcerted sheep are aware of a wise collie. His voice was never still: it was to be presumed that he slept at some mysterious time during the twenty-four hours, and yet his square, compact form seemed to be always drifting about at all hours of the day and night. Even when a hapless wight (in the throes of nightmare) tipped bodily out of his hammock on to the deck the first night, it was Harker who appeared noiselessly out of the shadows to tuck him in again.

Their names he had pat within twenty-four hours; this tightened his grip of the term instantly, but it also caused him to be regarded as scarcely canny. Indeed, it was disconcerting enough to regard yourself one moment as an insignificant and unknown unit among 250 others, and in this comfortable reflection to lean in a dégagé attitude against the white paintwork (one of the seven deadly sins): then to hear admonition and your name, coupled together like chain-shot, ring out along the crowded main-deck. Harker had seen you.

There were other C.P.O.’s on board: each term owned one. But they were, by comparison with Harker, sorry fellows. One was reputed to be given to beating the big{26} drum at Salvation Army meetings ashore, garbed, moreover, in a scarlet jersey. Hotly his term denied it, but the story was stamped with the unimpeachable authority of the boatswain’s 

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