Three days after leaving Gib. the weather became gloriously warm, the sea simply like a sheet of glittering glass, the sun glaring on it all day long. It was grand to be alive, and we all—officers and men alike—went into training, and were doubled round and round, morning and evening, till the sweat rolled off us. Every evening, too, the parallel bars and the horizontal bar were rigged on the quarterdeck, and the ward-room fellows and we gun-room people did gymnastics for an hour or so, finishing up with a follow-my-leader round the battery till we nearly dropped. On board the _Hercules_ they were doing gymnastics and the new Swedish drill, on the fo’c’stle, the whole day long. But the sight of all was the fat blue marine subaltern—the Forlorn Hope, we called him—doubling up and down the quarterdeck, on his own, to work off his fat, so that he could march properly when he landed—his cheeks flopping from side to side, and running with perspiration. I’m sure you would have died of laughing, especially when his opposite number—the Shadow—the awfully thin red marine subaltern, doubled round after him, trying to work up an appetite, and put on more weight. It was the terribly earnest faces they shipped that made one laugh. When you come to think of it, the whole thing was really jolly odd. Here were these two great grey ships, with their long grim 9.2’s and 7.5’s, and their twelve hundred odd men, pounding steadily along for eight days and nights, to a country hardly any one of us had heard of before, and every one on board both of them was digging out to make himself and them as fit as ’paint,’ in case there was a job for us when we did get there. The Commander even stopped bellowing at people, and brimmed over with good temper. We had two great heroes on board—at any rate the mids. thought they were—one of the lieutenants—Bigge—who had been with Sir Edward Seymour in the Relief of Pekin force, and Mr. Bostock, the Gunner, who had been through the siege of Ladysmith during the Boer War. Some one told the story how five Chinamen had attacked Bigge whilst he was trying to blow in a gate or something like that, and how he settled the whole lot of them with his revolver. Whether it was true or not—and I believe it was—the mids. simply hung round him now, and tried to get him to tell them some of his experiences. They looked at the little bit of yellow and red ribbon on his monkey-jacket, and simply longed for a chance to earn something like it, and have a bit of ribbon to stick on their chests. Although they never could get _him_ to talk about his show, Mr. Bostock would talk about the siege of Ladysmith, and how the naval brigade helped the sappers, that awful morning on the crest of Wagon Hill—would talk as long as they’d like to listen.