Azure Verity had sufficiently disturbed my mind, but I was destined to receive a worse shock before the day closed. I dined at Queen Anne's Gate, and we had a very amusing evening, trying over a number of folk-songs from Somerset, which the morris-dancers are making popular. I left at about eleven, and Alderley said he would walk with me as he had something to tell me. Briefly it was that Mr. Dabney had asked if he might pay his addresses to Naomi. He would not, he said, say anything to her until he had the parents' permission; which is punctilious of him if not romantic. I think, however, I see his point of view, which is that, being practically a Republican at heart, and certainly rather anti-English, he might be too repugnant a son-in-law for a public man like Mr. Wynne to consider, and it was therefore only honest to begin by giving the father the chance of refusal. Alderley, however, has no such objection to him; the objection comes from Naomi herself, who informed her father that she could never love Mr. Dabney and so settled the matter at once. And since one cannot think of him as precisely the build of a blighted and suicidal lover, the matter ends. But why should my heart again stand still as Alderley told me about it? CHAPTER XXIV WITH MR. BEMERTON'S ASSISTANCE I TAKE REFUGE AMID A GALLANT COMPANY OF SEA DOGS Mr. Bemerton again stood my very good friend, for he had sent up during the day a book which he thought would do something for my thirst for character; and indeed it did. It was a recent volume of the Navy Records Society--a full-blooded work entitled by its editor _Recollections by James Anthony Gardner_, but by this same Gardner, an officer in Nelson's day, _Naval Recollections in Shreds and Patches, with Strange Reflections above and under Hatches_. Being old enough to remember very vividly the shock that followed after that other James Anthony's rending of the Cheyne Row veil, I was not unwilling to get a new connotation for those two Christian names. And certainly James Anthony Gardner is a find. He was born in 1770, in what he thought the best of all lands--Ireland; and he came home from the sea in 1802, but he did not take his pen in hand until 1836, during which time his memory had purged itself of inessentials. He wrote them not for the cold eye of a publisher's reader but (like a gentleman) for his own family's entertainment. The result is a narrative of extraordinary directness, full of careless human qualities, naked and unashamed, and some pretty exercises in objurgation, prefaced by the following ingenious verses:--