CHAPTER XII

WAR AND AN IDYL

Taranaki War - Naval Brigade - Beauchamp Seymour (Lord Alcester) - Hotham - Province of Canterbury - Rencontre with the missing link - Muscular Bishops - An earthquake - An idyllic life - A Maori Chief's daughter - A change of Skipper - A warrior bantam - A phantom cat - Homeward bound Pay-off - Cram for examination - Back to Cheltenham - Some of my relatives - My cousin, Gambier Parry - Sicut omnes.

THE great Maori War now broke out in earnest, and it was only an extraordinary piece of good luck that, instead of annihilating Auckland as they could so easily have done the natives attacked the Taranaki District, the first brunt of the fighting falling on the gallant old 65th Regiment, which, having been stationed in that country for many years, consisted of well-seasoned men, more or less accustomed to bush life. To these were soon added a Naval Brigade, Niger, Cordelia, Pelorus, and the Colonial warship Victoria, generously placed at the disposal of the New Zealand Government by the Colony of Victoria. This force was gradually supplemented by reinforcements from Sydney the 14th Regiment and the 40th. Some artillery and engineers were already in New Zealand. But still this army, unprepared, badly equipped, indifferently organised, with leaders who, one after the other, lost their heads, figuratively, was a mere handful as

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THE MAORI WAR

against thousands of the bravest, fiercest, and most cunning of enemies that British arms had ever fought. In a short time we, of the Iris, were formed into an additional Brigade, 150 strong, with a 12-pounder howitzer (myself in command of this gun), and we were marched across the neck of land which divides Auckland from the West Coast, where we were bundled on board the Cordelia a small corvette, commanded by Captain Harcourt Vernon and were landed anyhow in the roaring surf at Taranaki. Here we quickly made an entrenched camp on a promontory in an advanced position, from which the Maori attack was to be expected, the burnt and deserted town of New Plymouth at our rear, the forest and wilderness before us, and towering above all the exquisitely-shaped Mount Egmont, a perfectly symmetrical cone, 9,000 feet high, with an even ring of snow half-way down its sides. I think few things mark off the old Navy from the new, so much as the advance made in service ashore in Naval Brigades. Nowadays a Naval Brigade is better disciplined and better organised in the strict military sense, has more cohesion, is better provisioned, and is better equipped than brigades of soldiers. In my day, when we landed at Taranaki, we simply transferred the decks of our frigate to terra firma. It is true we dug a deep trench and threw up an embankment ; but we did it on our own untutored design, and we believed, and I think so still, it was a great improvement on the earthworks of the Royal Engineers for the Army in that ours kept out the enemy and theirs did not. For we never had an ugly rush and men tomahawked in our tents, which, however, did happen to the soldiers. But this was also possibly due to the fact that our camp and ship life differed very little. We had no officer of the guard, sloping about in the mess-tent or guard-room, waiting to be called if anything happened, with sentries,

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NAVAL IDEAS OF A CAMP

whose ideas of keeping a look-out had been learnt on duty at Marlborough House or the Bank of England. In the Naval Camp we simply kept ordinary sea-watch, with bluejackets on the look-out, accustomed to have their weather-eye open, within easy reach of each other ; a lieutenant walking about night and day with precisely the same regularity as on the quarter-deck of his ship, with so many midshipmen of the watch, and half of the men sitting about with their rifles ready to spring out when called with the same alacrity as if they had to shorten sail in a squall. Boatswain's mates went about with their whistles and shouted orders in their stentorian voices; "bells" rang regularly every hour and half-hour, sea-fashion, lights went out, and "rounds" took place with the ordinary routine to which we were all accustomed. No one thought of going out of the camp without leave. When we were not landing provisions in the surf, and hauling them up the shore, we were drilling in camp with rifles or cutlasses, and exercising the men at taking down or rigging up tents.

We were soon quite comfortable, after a Mark Tapley order, as the weather was cold and rainy and the camp a sea of mud, and we ourselves generally wet through. But we made the best of it, our diversion being the capture and riding of horses that had been left behind by the settlers when they had to clear out. Amongst these settlers had been an uncle of mine, an ex-major of the 9th Lancers, who had been in all the great Indian fights - Chillian-wallah, Ferozeshah, Sobran, Moodkee, and so forth. He and many other fighting men - foreseeing the Maori War had early volunteered to serve the Queen in any capacity, but the wisdom, or jealousy, of our Generals declined their services. But two months afterwards these wiseacres were scouring every corner of the Colonies for any kind of ragamuffin who could carry a musket. Of

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AUCKLAND

fighting there was soon plenty, with surprises and ambuscades, where the tomahawk, fastened to the end of a long stick, over-reached the bayonet, and where several thousand Maoris would suddenly appear, or disappear, like mist on a mountain : their wonderful women, their commissariat. After a time Beauchamp Seymour Lord Alcester, later on took command of our Brigade, as brave a man as ever trod shoe leather, and regular warfare on some intelligent plan began, instead of the isolated, incoherent system previously at work. And bravest amongst the brave of the junior officers was Charlie Hotham, then a midshipman, and now an Admiral of the Fleet. But it is invidious to select names where so many did well.

* * * * *

The first burst of war over, and troops having arrived from Sydney and others from India, the Iris Naval Brigade returned to our ship, leaving some of the men from other vessels still ashore.

We again had a long spell in Auckland, with nothing exciting as regards myself, though incidents of some moment occurred to many of my brother officers, no less than three lieutenants, one marine officer, and the paymaster getting married, three of the number into one family. My ship contributed a fair average of husbands to the Colonies, for the parson and three other lieutenants had already got married in Sydney.

We visited many bays and anchorages on the coast of New Zealand, where the Maori still lived with his family on his own land without benefit of law. Now these sites are occupied by flourishing towns, with police, prisons, pothouses, and parsons, and all the other embellishments of civilisation, including the last farce of all, municipal government. At Port Lyttleton the harbour for Canterbury strolling one day into a ramshackle bar-saloon, with a billiard-room attached, built chiefly of old packing-cases

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"MONKEY' OF CHELTENHAM

and illuminated by two or three evil-smelling oil-lamps, I saw perched up on one end of the table, swinging a pair of short, distorted legs and sucking the top of a billiard cue, what I at first took to be an enormous gorilla in trousers and shirt sleeves. Save this horrible apparition, the room had no other occupant, and I prepared to back out of it, with that instinctive fear of being strangled associated with this kind of monster. But whatever the thing was it nimbly landed itself on its inturned feet, and, addressing me in perfectly good English, asked if I wished to play. I looked at it for a moment. Only once before in my life had I ever seen so hideous a countenance. Suddenly a gloomy evening in the Fives' Courts at Cheltenham College flashed before my eyes, and I recognised "Monkey" of my school-days. I did not tell him I knew him, for the position he was in was not pleasant, and he did not recognise me, but I had confirmation of his identity with the tormentor of my boyhood by hearing him summoned by his well-remembered name to the saloon to "chuck" out some disturber of the peace : which he did with extreme ease. Evidently the phenomenal strength of arm and back which had made him a terror at Cheltenham had not been impaired, and, what was equally evident, he had found the one occupation in life for which alone he was suited.

The Province of Canterbury was a settlement originally founded by ecclesiastics, with the praiseworthy idea that it should be a new Palestine of high religious endeavour under an Anglican dispensation. How far it realised their expectations it is difficult to say, though they must have ceased to expect much even before the Colony was two years old. The road from Port Lyttleton to the Plains of Canterbury lay over a most fatiguing mountain path, which, zig-zagging up an angle of forty-five degrees, was considered a marvel of engineering enterprise in those

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CANTERBURY AND WELLINGTON

pioneer days. To reach the top people were in the habit of holding on to a tow rope hung over the hind-quarters of a mule, whilst to go down on the other side, which was still more abrupt and was even more fatiguing necessitated frequent sitting down. The view from the ridge was grand, the sea rising up like the rim of a vast blue bason on two-thirds of the perimeter, a great rolling plain completing the circle of the horizon, over which, in the far distance, lay the snow-clad peaks of the New Zealand Alps.

A general feature of New Zealand Society in those days, and more especially in Canterbury, was the muscular Bishop; but one grew tired of learning how this one pulled in the Oxford Eight, or that one "held the record" (though that hateful expression was not then invented) for high jumping, or a third for boxing, and so on. Even their wives were marvels, not to say abnormal, for it was quite expected of them to break in buckjumpers and to have from ten to twenty children between whiles ; whilst one lady, though beginning somewhat late, beat them all by having her first child at fifty-two.

On our way North again we visited Wellington, then a very small and unimportant place, with a beautiful land-locked harbour. Whilst there we had a severe earthquake, the rumour spreading that the entrance to the harbour was blocked. But, alas ! it proved unfounded, to the infinite disappointment of many of us who hoped that the Ship would never get out, and that we should lie there comfortably until another vessel came from England to relieve us. On shore a good deal of damage was done. The earth had opened in one place, and had swallowed up some cattle, but closed again so quickly that it jammed a cow between its folds, leaving half the poor beast sticking up above the ground. I did not see it myself, but was told it by men who said they had. It is rather an

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A BEAUTIFUL MAORI WOMAN

interesting illustration of the Korah, Dathan, and Abiram affair, though I do not remember any mention of half-measures with those unlucky sinners.

In a small bay on the East Coast of New Zealand, not far from Auckland, a curiously idyllic life was being led. Here lived a white man, ex-captain of a whaler, who had built himself a house after the Maori pattern a large roof resting on four solid trees, divided into two or three rooms inside and had gathered round him a wealth of goats, pigs, ducks, and fowls. He was a man of about forty, striking in appearance and active as a gladiator. His weather-beaten face, grey eyes, strong jaw, and crisp, curly hair, showed his self-reliant nature. When I went up to his house he was mending the sails of his whale-boat, and standing behind him was his wife, a Maori girl of about two-and-twenty. She was the daughter of a chief of one of the East Coast tribes near Hawkes's Bay, and like chiefs' daughters everywhere, bore unmistakable signs of good breeding, with shapely hands and gentle voice. As a type of Maori womanhood at its best I will describe her. She was considerably over the average height of woman, somewhere, I should say, about five feet seven, as she stood in her bare feet. Her figure was as straight as a dart, her beautifully poised head surrounded by a nimbus of short, wavy brown hair falling loose on her somewhat square shoulders. Her complexion was one uniform, pale colour like ivory faintly tinted with Vandyke brown. Her eyebrows, almost meeting, made a straight line across her low forehead and seemed to mix with the brown waves on her temples. Her eyes, dark hazel, had a wide look in them with the steady gaze of a child. Her nose was straight, but with large nostrils which dilated with every passing emotion. Her mouth was broad and lips well formed, but she rarely smiled. Her chin was particularly strong with a broad split in it, and

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AN IDYL

adding firmness to a singularly strong face. She was dressed in one single garment in form like a travelling-rug made of some rough native cloth, dyed orange and red, with hundreds of tags of red worsted for a fringe, and with diagonal bands of black cloth sewn across it. It was worn thrown across one shoulder, passing under one arm, which it left bare, reaching below the knee on the longer side, but displaying a good deal of limb on the other. Its statuesque grace was a mystery, for Phidias would not have altered a single fold ; from the whale 's-tooth fibia which fastened it on her shoulder to the fringe dangling over her ankles. She was a woman who might have made or marred an Empire ; and yet Destiny had given her to a whaling captain ; to cook his food and feed his ducks in a remote bay of the remotest portion of the globe. In connection with these humble labours I saw here a curious instance of how quickly animals and birds will adapt themselves to food for which they were never designed. She fed these flocks of ducks on oysters, which grew in masses on the rocks below high-water mark, and it was a picturesque sight to watch. At a low whistle her whole flock would come waddling out of the long grass and from amongst the trees fringeing the shore and hurry after her down to the sea-side. With an accurate tap from a long-handled hammer she would knock open the oysters, which the ducks, scuffling after her, greedily gobbled up, pushing each other into deep pools, out of which they scrambled as best they could. I never saw fatter birds. The produce of this small farm went to Auckland in coasting schooners, and the return cargo would be generally gunpowder, arms, and tobacco, which the whaling skipper sold at a great profit to the natives. He became fairly well off, but, alas ! the report of his success spread, and other Settlers came and dumped themselves down in this sweet spot, when all its idyllic

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HOMEWARD BOUND

charm vanished, and with it, no doubt, the peace and content of the whaler and his Maori wife.

* * * * *

Most lives even the most prosaic move in cycles in which fresh events and new ideas grow in the place of the old. Such a cycle was now at hand in mine, for I was to pass, almost at a bound, from boy to man.

Our commission in Australia had come to an end, our Skipper had left us, and had gone home by mail, and Captain Harcourt Vernon, of the Cordelia, reigned in his stead. He brought happiness with him, for in less than three days peace pervaded the ship, every one looking and feeling freer, though discipline was not relaxed. Even the cat-of-nine-tail slept undisturbed for the rest of the commission, lying snug in her red-baize bag in the boatswain's store-room ; the rattans with which the ship's boys hands had been battered black and blue, grew stiff for want of exercise, whilst hungry midshipmen no longer clung to the cross-trees for hours in all weathers, or were robbed of their hard-earned night's sleep because some one else was in a beastly temper. But our commission was nearly at an end. A few alterations took place amongst the officers, some exchanging into other ships and one or two leaving the Service, amongst them Deane, who married, settled down in Canterbury, and made a fortune.

Then, after a thorough refit aloft and after many sad adieux in Auckland, we finally sailed on our long voyage home, nigh on 16,000 miles, round Cape Horn.

As a record of old days it may interest the dismasted modern sailor to hear that the first thing done on getting to sea was to strike below our upper-deck guns, to bend our best suit of sails and reeve new running rigging, precautions for our stormy passage on the great circle to the Horn, skirting the vast ice barrier of the Antarctic regions.

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THE ANTARCTIC

Not fifty per cent., all told, of those who had left the shores of England in that small frigate were returning to them again on board her. Death, marriage, disaster, and promotion had disposed of the officers, and the cat accounted certainly for two-thirds of the bluejackets. But I cannot omit to mention one most important life which had weathered it all, a gallant, little bantam cock, by name Billy, a desperate and well-nigh unconquered fighter. It was mere chance that brought this winged warrior on board the Iris at Chatham, intended by the gun-room Steward to grace a midshipman's feast, but reserved by Destiny to leave his mark on two hemispheres. In Europe, America, Africa and Australia, and many Ocean islands wherever and whenever fresh hens and their attendant lords embarked on board the frigate, his shrill clarion rang through the decks, as he marched up and down, peering in between the bars of the coops to discover a feathered male thing that had temerity enough to breathe in the same air as himself. Not half the size of anything that he was pitted against, yet none could resist the fury of his onslaught, so that most birds fled at once or remained to die. He lived a life of entire freedom, roaming the decks at his own will, roosting in the boom-boats in fine weather or perching on a gun-tackle near the galley on the main-deck, if it were bad. His most intimate friend and inseparable companion was Lee, the boatswain's mate afore-mentioned, and I have often seen this queer little bird sitting on the hammock-rail in the ship's waist as the man marched up and down on watch, when, if it was blowing hard and the sea coming over the netting, Lee would lift the hammock cover and put Master Billy inside, where he would remain perfectly content until Lee was relieved at eight bells. When Lee went ashore he almost always took Billy with him, indeed the bird would often remain on shore weeks at a

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OUR WARRIOR BANTAM

time, on leave, visiting farms, where his reputation for valour and his personal beauty made him welcome to many a comely foreign or Colonial hen. But he always came back when the anchor was weighed and the top-sails again hoisted. Before he left the Colonies and islands he had a large number of relations both by marriage and by blood. Revisiting some of the islands of the Pacific and bays of New Zealand we were frequently shown his descendants ; Bishop Selwyn called him a " born sailor," and a funny, snuffy, old German professor, who collected beetles, christened him Augustus Der Stark. But the tide of his victories remained no more unchecked than those of Caesar or Hannibal, for he at last suffered defeat and even came near losing his life. On leaving Auckland a huge barn-door cock embarked for passage with our sea stock of fowls. Billy saw him at once, and as usual, strutted before the hen-coop crowing his loudest challenge. The bird behind the bars grew furious, and of course a fight was at once arranged. But the heavy, well-bred New Zealander soon out-matched our hero, bearing him down by sheer weight and leaving him apparently dead on the deck. But Lee picked him up, limp and shorn of all his head feathers and his comb gone, bathed him with hot water and gave him a spoonful or two of rum, which revived him, whilst other bluejackets nursed him night and day by the galley-fire. He eventually recovered, and when the ship paid off at Chatham, departed, in splendid plumage, sitting on Lee's shoulder. But with that sense of fair play, which so pre-eminently distinguishes sailormen in all fighting matters, the life of "Maori," as the New Zealander had been christened, was spared, and he, too, reached England, retiring in company with a marine to Chatham Barracks, where, no doubt, he oft recounted the story of the battle of Cape Horn, to an admiring group of British hens.

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THE ANTARCTIC

I have been shipmates with ghosts in one or two ships, but we had none that I know of in the Iris, except that of a cat ; the evidence in support of whose spectral apparition seems better than that of most such phenomena. This fearsome animal, when in the flesh, belonged to the captain of the hold, a functionary who spends a more or less lonely life buried in the bowels of the vessel, over-hauling casks and provisions ; storage and restorage his one preoccupation. Naturally rats are his deadly enemies and cats a necessity of his existence. Our captain of the hold, an ancient mariner with a back bent double with ages of groping in the wings of ships, brought on board with him a long, slim black cat tied up in a blue bag, who at once went down into the hold as into familiar quarters, only occasionally emerging at night into the light of between-decks, if one could call light the semi-obscurity of a few tallow-dips in horn lanterns. Often and often have I looked down into the hold and seen this weird animal following its devious course amongst the casks in pursuit of the wily rat ; or, perchance, sitting by the side of the ancient mariner, chewing pork rind. Then came a time when his place knew him no more, when he no longer answered to the melodious call of his master's voice as the latter crawled into the remotest recesses of his domain crying, " Guts ! Guts ! " the missing creature's name. Not a trace of him could be found, nor yet when, in Auckland, some time after, the hold was partially cleared. Then, one night, a year after this, a bluejacket seated by the cat-head on the look-out, suddenly saw Guts sitting near him on the hammock-netting. He was so certain of this that he reached out his hand to stroke the animal, but to his dismay, instead of the creature merely skipping down and going away, for he was not a sociable cat, he simply vanished into thin air. Needless to say no one believed the man's story, for even in men-of-war some

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A GHOST-CAT

persons may spin yarns, but a short time after Guts was seen again, and then again, in all manner of places, until the crew began to have a superstitious belief that some one had thrown him overboard to spite old Bung the familiar cognomen of all captains of holds who was not a popular character, and that, in consequence, disaster must overtake the ship. I do not think there were ten men in the Iris who did not believe in this wraith. But after two years from the time when he was first missing his crumbling skeleton was found underneath some casks of pork which had not been disturbed since we had hoisted them in in Sydney at a corresponding time. It will be asked why no bad smell led to the finding of the body. The answer is that rats had devoured every scrap of him, except the bones, and that, probably, within a few hours of finding him dead.

* * * * *

I quitted New Zealand and Australia with a heavy heart. I do not see how any right-feeling lad of nineteen could have felt otherwise. For I had left behind me numbers of boon companions and friends in every port we had visited. Also of my girl friends there were souvenirs in scores in the till of my chest : dead flowers, ribbons, ball programmes, single gloves spotted with something salt that had taken the colour out of them and small paper packets with names and dates. What sad yet pleasant memories they evoked, each with its own ghost fragrance ! But at last the sight of them became unbearable, their chiding looks staring me in the face whenever I lifted the lid of this midshipman's holy of holies, or haunting me as I paced the deck in my night-watch : when I would fancy I heard voices coming to me on the wings of the gale : the sound in my ears of music in a lighted ball-room, or the chirp of a Cicada in some scented garden. Then I would think of the new life

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CAPE HORN

before me, whilst the certainty that no word from any of the gentle friends who had given me these little keep-sakes would ever come to me from across those thousands of miles of ocean made my heart sick.

At last, one night, a heroic resolve came to me. Throughout the four long hours of the first-watch these memories had been crowding on me, conjured up with extra reality by the strains of a favourite waltz being played that evening by the band. At midnight I went below, opened my chest and lit the candle, made all these haunting gifts up into a packet in a small lace handkerchief, weighting the whole with buckshot. Then I went on deck again and aft to the tafirail, and, as a big wave came crashing up astern, all in the inky darkness I committed these relics to its keeping. And as the frigate rolled on, clearing herself of the foam, I knew that no mortal hand could touch them again as long as this world lasts.

A night or two following on these obsequies we came near losing our ship and all our lives. It was my middle-watch, when the look-out suddenly roared out, "Iceberg right ahead, sir!" There was not a moment to lose for it was pitch-dark, with occasional blinding storms of hail and snow. Though blowing hard, as we were running before the wind we were carrying a good deal of sail which made it dangerous to come to rapidly. However, indecision meant total loss of the ship and all hands, and as there was no time to shorten sail I ordered the helm to be put down and took my chance of the mast going over the side. Up she came in the wind, every yard buckling like a fishing-rod ; but by this time I had turned the hands up, and in a minute or two Vernon and the First Lieutenant were on deck and my responsibility over. We had an extra-ordinary escape, for a vast iceberg, probably two or

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ICEBERGS

three miles long, lay stretched right across our course, and as we crawled away to windward, which nothing but such a perfect sailer as the Iris could have accomplished, we could hear the deafening roar of the breakers hurling themselves against the cliff of ice, and could see the shimmer of the spray in that curious white light which hangs above ice even on the darkest night.

But our troubles with the bergs were not over for we soon encountered others, and finally found ourselves in a veritable archipelago of ice islands. It seemed impossible at one time to extricate ourselves and it was not until daylight, when we saw an open channel to the southward, that any of us breathed freely.

In a gale of wind we rounded the Horn, standing up in the mist like a grim phantom. Beyond it, eastward, we looked across the whole stretch of the sea world, unbroken water from the South Pole to the North, the Atlantic, with all its vast diversity of climates, continents, and lands.

Then, with a glimpse of the lonely, fog-bound Falkland Islands, one fine morning, after many weeks' sailing, we hear the boom of the morning gun of St. Helena, now, no longer, an utmost outpost of our Empire, and, as the day draws on, catch sight of its steep cliffs and high-peaked mountains rising sheer out of the ocean. Nearer, and we see British ships, rolling at their anchors in the open roadstead, amongst them a bit of old-world history, a sight rarely or never seen now, namely, a British man-of-war guarding a slave-ship captured on the high seas. It was a curious sight, the bulwarks of the slaver a mass of black heads, men, women, and children, emaciated and half-starved, but laughing and gesticulating, being once more able to move their limbs freely, released from the foetid atmosphere of the lower deck of the slaver, where they had lain chained together for weeks in filth and misery. There were also many other

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ST. HELENA

craft lying off St. Helena : a large sailing passenger ship bound for Sydney, a pearling schooner for Torres Straits, an East Indiaman with troops for India, officers and their wives crowding the poop, the "greenhorns" grinning over the bulwarks, their first, and, in many cases, their last voyage, for probably a third of them would never see England again, sickening and dying, in a very few months, in Shiny Land.

I went up to Longwood and saw Napoleon's house and grave, and was powerfully impressed by his death-mask, a plaster-cast taken immediately after death. Whether it was association of ideas, or some potent influence of the very form of his features, I know not ; but certain I am I have never looked on its like.

After two or three days spent in refitting aloft we sailed for England, the ordinary events of our lives following on each other with the same regularity, and a few deaths, sad and pathetic, almost in sight of the land where fathers and mothers, wives and sweethearts, have awaited them for four long years.

Then at last comes a night when we are all craning over the bulwarks to catch sight of the Lizard Light ; and when we do see it, scarcely able to realise that it stands on a British rock. And as dawn comes on, and the land rises out of the mist hanging over the moist counties of Devon and Cornwall, it seems still more difficult to realise that English homesteads, with farm-hands already at the plough, milkmaids in the byres, English cocks and hens scratching and running back to catch English worms, are there.

With a strong south-wester after her, and every stitch of canvas it was safe to carry, the Iris staggered gaily up Channel, one familiar headland after another showing up until, at midnight, on the 24th of July, 1861, we dropped our anchor at Spithead. But by six in the morning

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MEETING WITH MY FATHER

we were again under way, finally reaching Chatham and paying off on the 3rd of August.

Meanwhile my father, with my penultimate brother, Alfred, afterwards in the 4th Hussars, had come to Chatham to meet the ship, and well can I remember the mixed feelings with which I saw these two coming along the dockside, my father greyer and more bent, but with his light step and jaunty air unimpaired, Alfred, a tall lad of six feet, whom I had left a child. I call to mind, too, how, as my father came over the side, I felt instinctively that the old order had passed away, that in some strange way we were no longer the father and son who had parted five years before, and who would never know each other again. Alfred, too, was a stranger, recalling nothing to me of the sweet, chubby, little boy I remembered him, or of any member of our family. Everything seemed awkward and stiff, with the eyes of my messmates and brother officers on us, men with whom I was more in touch than with these two of my own flesh and blood.

We roamed about the decks in a condition of unfamiliar restraint, and went down into the berth, where I can distinctly recall the feeling I had that its strong smell of cockroaches and bilge-water, its dim light, and the rough appearance of most of my messmates - extra shabby after so many months at sea - must have jarred on the rather hyper-sensitive instincts of my polished old father, who always bore about him the very essence of a man of quality - a bearing Alfred also had largely inherited. I felt they were thinking that I had fallen in my degree. But in this I was quite mistaken ; for their innate perception only showed them the better side of this simple, unpretentious life of duty and necessity.

We went ashore and dined at the old inn, by the pier at Chatham, sacred to the memory of Pickwick and his companions, and, but for a fat, old waiter who had come

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CHATHAM

to believe that he had really seen these immortals in the flesh regaling us with pot-house legends and making the time pass, we should have been dull indeed. Amongst other anecdotes this venerable old Ganymede told us was how once a woman had hidden herself in a cupboard which he showed us in the room, to overhear what went on at a Masonic meeting, but that being discovered, by her dog scenting her out, she had been hauled out and there and then made a Mason with all due Masonic rites.

As to myself, I was preternaturally silent and stupid, though I had innumerable things to tell, and still more to hear. In reality I knew so little of what was going on, or had gone on at home all these years, that I felt out of it. Names of places and people cropped up in their talk of whom I knew nothing, and every moment it was "Oh! I forgot; of course you don't remember" this, that, or the other. But what I did learn was that our home was breaking up, that a new migration was in contemplation, and that once more the nomad condition in which we had always lived was to be renewed as, indeed, it was, for they never settled again anywhere for any length of time.

The ship having paid off, after two or three days' leave at home I went off straight to Portsmouth to pass for Lieutenant, determined to get through all the examinations whilst what I had been cramming up on my way home was still in that terrible sieve, my memory. For the new Navy, then in its infancy, had been born during our long absence in the Pacific ; new and unheard-of guns had been invented, new drills, new signals, and, above all, to pass in "Steam" was now compulsory. So with a resolution which astonished me then, and has continued to do so ever since, I worked night and day, determined to get through. For, literally, with the exception of seamanship, which had become my second nature, and

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I PASS FOR LIEUTENANT

to which I gave no thought, everything I had to cram into my head was new. Suffice it to say I succeeded far better than I expected, getting first-class in Seamanship, first in the College (Mathematics, Navigation, and so forth), and a very good second in Gunnery. Unfortunately, during my exam, on board the Excellent (Gunnery), I broke down from overwork, fainting whilst ramming home a shot in an old 32-lb. muzzle-loader. But being caught by the heels by the man next to me, as I tumbled out of the port, I was saved from drowning. I recovered rapidly enough, but I felt weak and dull during the next two days, and was more than surprised to find I had passed at all in Gunnery, and greatly elated when I found I had done so well.

Thus ends my midshipman's life, for I was now a full-blown Sub-Lieutenant, as it had pleased their Lordships to designate the quondam mate, and with an intense sense of relief I turned my face towards home.

For six or seven months I was now kicking my heels about on half-pay, to wit five shillings a day ; and spent my time chiefly in Dieppe, to which refuge our family had meanwhile migrated. None of us regretted leaving Cheltenham, the atmosphere of the place was essentially common-place, and the Promenade, where daily one met the same people, smelt of curry-powder, for every one was "Indian." Our own relations and chief friends were unspeakably dull, a maternal uncle, shot through the knee in action, and always speaking of himself as a "poor old beast of a wounded soldier," who had come down from a smart command of Horse Artillery to cooking peas and vegetables for himself in a bain marie, and keeping household accounts to the thousandth part of a farthing, whilst his wife's highest aspirations were to array her portly person in the lightest-coloured and tightest-fitting of bodices, the skirt with broad flounces,

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CHELTENHAM

distended over the largest crinoline in Europe, or that my uncle's pension could command, with a broad lace collar fastened to what was technically her waist by a huge white cornelian brooch with a spray of forget-me-nots on it in turquoise, and thus attired to sail down the aforesaid Promenade, as far as Furber's, the jewellers, beyond which it was the unwritten law of fashionable Cheltenham for no lady to penetrate into the town. Here she would tack and come up again, passing and repassing whole fleets of other dames, rigged up like herself, ten or fifteen times in the same afternoon. Not that Cheltenham was a bad place, from a matrimonial point of view, for it was the happy hunting-ground of hundreds of young men from India, with whom it was still a custom to get married on their pay. They came to Cheltenham for wives as naturally as a man goes to a restaurant for his dinner, and I am bound to say an uncommonly pleasant menu of pretty girls was provided, suitable for every kind of palate.

About ten miles away we had a cousin, Gambier-Parry, of Highnam Court, a charming, gifted man, at whose house might be met all that was cultured and intellectual in England. He always asked my father and the rest of us to stay at his place when he had the aforesaid uncle and aunt and other Cheltenham people there, to whom he had to show attention. It was tactful and nice of him, as of course they were exactly the people we most wished to meet, and with whom we, and my father especially, had most ideas in common.

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