My Marine—the skirmisher in South American Suburbs—stood under the shadow of the poop looking like a stuffed man with an automatic arm for saluting purposes; but I knew him on the human side. ‘Goin’ off to-morrow, ain’t you, sir? Well, there are only twenty of us ’ere, but _if_ you ever want to see the Marines, a lot of ’em, it might perhaps be worth your while to’—and he gave me the address of a place where I would find plenty of Marines. He spoke as though his nineteen friends were no-class animals; and a foreigner would have taken him at his word. A ‘COMMODIOUS COFFEE-GRINDER’ The entire Ward-room explained carefully that their commodious coffee-grinder must not be taken as a sample of the Navy at its best. Wasn’t she a good sea-boat? Oh, yes; remarkably so. Couldn’t she go on occasion? Oh, yes. She could go, but, after all, she wasn’t a patch on certain other craft, being only a third-class cruiser—practically an enlarged destroyer—a tin-pot of the tinniest. ‘Now in my last ship,’ the Captain began. That was an unlucky remark, for I remembered that last ship and a certain first night aboard her in the long swell of Simon’s Bay, when the Captain took Heaven and Earth and the Admiralty to witness that of all cluttered-up boxes of machinery and bags of tricks his new command was the worst. To hear him now she must have been a trifle larger than the _Majestic_ with twice the _Powerful’s_ speed. We are a deceptive people. ‘Come and see us next year when we’ve shaken down a bit,’ said the Ward-room, ‘and you’ll like it better.’ That last was impossible, but I accepted the offer. Our cruiser was about to refit at some Dockyard or other in a few days, and I gathered that it would be no fault of the Captain, the Ward-room or the warrant officers if she did not arrive with a list of alterations and improvements as long as her mainmast. So it is with every new ship. The dear boys take her out to see what she can do, and in that process discover what she cannot do. If by any arrangement or rearrangement of stay, stanchion, davit, steam-pipe, bridge, boat-chocks, or hatchway she can, in their judgment, be improved, rest assured that the dockyard will know it by letter and voice. She never gets more than half what she wants, and so is careful to apply for thrice her needs. DISCONTENTED AND IMPENITENT THIEVES