Only eight months ago Ginger Hood and I had been midshipmen aboard the old _Vengeance_, and of course had spent most of our time, in her, trying to get to windward of her sub, pull his leg, and dodge any job of work which came along. Now the boot was on the other leg, for we were sub-lieutenants ourselves—he in the _Hercules_, I in the _Hector_, with gun-rooms of our own to boss, and as we’d only been at the job for a month, you can guess that we hadn’t quite settled down yet, and felt jolly much like fish out of water. The _Hector_ and _Hercules_ were two big armoured cruisers, as like as two peas, and they had come straight out from England to Gibraltar to work up for their first gunnery practices. For the last ten days they had been lying inside the New Mole waiting for a strong south-easter to blow itself out, and we had taken the opportunity of trying to make our two gun-rooms friendly; for, as a matter of fact, they hated each other like poison, his mids. taking every opportunity of being rude to mine, and mine to his. These rows were always reported to us, and if we hadn’t been such chums, I do believe that we, too, should have fallen out. If a _Hercules_ mid. came aboard the _Hector_ on duty, my chaps would let him wear his legs out on the quarterdeck for hours sooner than ask him down below, and you can guess that they were just as kind aboard the _Hercules_ if any of my mids. had to go aboard her. I had sixteen of the beauties in my gun-room to look after, and Ginger had fifteen; if his were more bother to him than mine were to me, I don’t wonder he thought that his hair was turning grey. Never did they meet ashore without a free fight or some trouble or another cropping up. The row had started on board the _Cornwall_, where they had all been together as cadets, over some wretched boat-race. The winning crew had used racing oars, which the second boat’s crew either hadn’t had the savvy to get, or didn’t find out till too late that they might have used. However it was, there had been a glorious row at the time, and as some of my mids. had pulled in the losing boat and some of Ginger’s in the winning one, both gun-rooms still kept the feud going. Ginger and I thought that the best way to patch up their quarrel was to make them play matches against each other, and this we had done—’soccer,’ hockey, and cricket on the dockyard ground, and a ’rugger’ game on the North Front. There wasn’t the slightest improvement. I had jawed my chaps till I was tired, and Ginger had jawed his, without the least effect; and now they’d just spoilt what might have been a grand game of hockey by squabbling all the time, claiming fouls, and ’sticks,’ and nonsense like that, every other minute. The game had been so unpleasant that Ginger and I were thankful when it was finished, slipped on our coats and watched our two teams quarrelling and taunting each other as they left the ground in two separate groups.