Apart altogether from the weirdness of it, worthy Dr. Turk’s simply-told story is full of interest, by reason of the side-light it throws on the nautical character of his time. No maker of phrases is the honest naval surgeon. A fight the good man curtly accepts as in the day’s work; and as all “prepare to do their duty,” he “descends into the cockpit” to do his, in the serene assurance of victory, since “defeat never entered our thoughts,” and the mere reference thereto is contemptuously relegated to a parenthesis. So matter-of-fact is he, so doggedly does he stick to the topic he has in hand, that he has not a word to spare to describe the fight, or to tell of its issue. That is outside his task. He has stayed on deck, indeed, to hear the Commodore’s “short and animated address,” and then his place is in the cockpit, with his instruments out, his coat off, and his shirt-sleeves turned up, waiting for what contributions the effort to attain the “glory of the victory” may send down the ladder to him. But as he goes he thinks of his patient. Quite an ordinary sea-dog, this patient, clearly, in the surgeon’s estimation. “The rough, profane, illiterate sailor” of the period--proved by his conversation to be “ignorant and abandoned”; destitute utterly of talents and learning. No word of approval for this waif from out the “tops” has the laconic surgeon; yet, although seemingly because it was so commonplace an attribute that he does not care to go out of his way to apply the term, he has discerned in him the spirit of heroism. So he condemns William Kemble to death, should he stir; and further, he bethinks himself of the force of discipline, and so adds to his representations as a surgeon his order as an officer. William Kemble, as well he might, has promised obedience; but the “sound of the first gun” overcomes at once the assurance of death and the bonds of discipline. Little good can “the glory of the victory” work for this “rough, profane, and illiterate sailor.” It is the fighting impulse in him, the ardour of the fray, as Kinglake has it, that conquers death and discipline, whistles down the wind “my admonitions and his own danger.” And so, by and by, after he has survived to characteristically damn the surgeon’s mates “in true sailor fashion” for starving him, William Kemble removed to the “sick berth, commonly called bay,” finds that there is no more fight left in him, and Dr. Birchmore comes on deck and reports him dead.