"Fancy getting away from all this!" I thought, and looked round at the babel of traffic and the throngs of people. Fancy getting away from the Channel Fleet for a time! I thought of my ship, the _Russell_, lying under Portland Bill, with other huge grey monsters; and thought of the tense readiness for war aboard them, and the strain of it, month after month. In a few weeks, with luck, I might be three thousand miles away, patrolling the Persian Gulf—free as air—with a good launch under me, and probably a 4.7-inch gun in her bows, ready to tackle any gun-running Arab dhow which came along. Prize money, too—there’d be a chance of that as well. It was grand. Collingwood, poor old Collingwood—I’d known him in the _Britannia_—dead of sunstroke, and the gunner gone mad! That didn’t sound as if the job was exactly a bed of roses. But Copeland had put my name down—the die was cast; I didn’t mind if the whole crew had died of sunstroke and plague combined. I rather hoped that they had, and that any other chap who applied for the _Bunder Abbas_ would—well—feel a little less keen about her when he heard. I didn’t notice the rain or the mud splashed on my trousers from the roadway. I could have whooped with joy. All these silly clothes my tailor bothered to make tight here or loose there, to show more or show less of the waistcoat, as silly fashion changed—why, with luck, in a month’s time, a pair of flannel trousers and a cricket shirt would be all the wardrobe I should want. I’d be my own skipper, with a dozen blue-jackets, and a stout launch under us; that 4.7-inch gun—or perhaps it would be a twelve-pounder—shining in the bows under the awning. Wouldn’t it shine, too! There’d be nothing much else to do but burnish it, and burnished it should be till I could shave by it. All that afternoon I waited patiently at the club for the evening paper, and directly the waiter brought it into the smoking-room I pounced on it. Sure enough, under "Naval Appointments" was my name—"Paul R. Martin appointed _Intrepid_" (she was one of the cruisers on the East Indies Station) "for armed launch _Bunder Abbas_". I gave a shout of delight, which rather startled some old fogies there; and a man sitting near—a naval doctor whom I knew slightly—laughed at me, wanting to know what was the matter. I pointed out the appointment. "Look at that! Isn’t that grand?" "_Bunder Abbas_," he said, as we lay back in the luxurious chairs—they really did feel comfortable now that I was going out to the waste parts of the world. "That was Collingwood’s launch. What’s become of him?" "Died of sunstroke," I told him.