I may as well tell you about the two young beauties. Bob Temple was, unfortunately for me, my cousin—a scraggy, freckled, untidy midshipman, who hadn’t the brains to get into mischief, or to get out of it again, but for his pal the Angel. What had made them chum together I don’t know, for the Angel (Tommy Sparks) was the exact opposite of Bob—as spruce and ladylike a chap as you ever saw, always beautifully neat and clean, with a face like a girl’s, light hair, and blue eyes. He looked as though butter couldn’t possibly melt in his mouth, and devoted every moment when he wasn’t asleep or eating to getting himself and my _dear_ young cousin into a scrape. It was one of his latest efforts which had cost them watch and watch for three days, and that was why they were keeping the ’middle’ with me that night; so you can guess why they were so keen on the coaling signal, and had streaked down below. It didn’t matter to me a tinker’s curse how many watches the Angel kept, but with Cousin Bob it mattered a good deal. His people looked on me as his bear-leader, and every time he got into a row sooner or later I heard about it from them, or from his sister Daisy. I’m hanged if you are going to hear any more about her, except that she used to think me a brute whenever his leave was stopped, or he had ’watch and watch,’ and put it all down to me. I hadn’t had to cane him yet, but I knew that would have to happen sooner or later, and I guessed that when it did happen, she’d write me a pretty good ’snorter.’ Don’t think that Bob would peach—not he, intentionally—but I knew exactly what he’d write home—something like this: ’The Angel sends his love—he and I cheeked the Padre at school yesterday—we had awful fun—old Billums (that was I) caned the two of us after evening quarters. This morning we both pretended we couldn’t sit down, and groaned when we tried to, till the Padre went for old Billums for laying it on so hard. We’ve got our leave stopped for trying to catch rats on the booms with a new trap which the Angel has invented. The Commander caught his foot in it. You should have heard him curse.’ That was the kind of thing that used to go home, and his father and mother, and my mother too, to say nothing of Daisy, put it all down to me. I had to turn the hands ’out’ at seven bells, to rig coaling screens, the whips, and all the other gear for coaling, turned over my watch to the fat marine subaltern who relieved me, and got a couple of hours’ sleep before the coal lighters bumped alongside.