These reminiscences prepare the reader to find that Gardner and his friends, when in Pisa for a night or so during the carnival, were not precisely a band of reverent Ruskinites. "One of our midshipmen pelted Lord Hervey in his coach, and when told it was the British ambassador, and that he looked very angry, immediately hove another volley at Lady Hervey, observing that she looked better tempered than his Excellency." Returning to Leghorn, they had a strong party of English officers to dinner, which was completed by rolling a waiter in the table-cloth along with the plates and dishes. A midshipman then took a loaf and let it fall from the second-floor window upon the jaw of an Italian in the street; which floored him. No one, however, minded. "Would this," asks Gardner, "have been the case in England, where every hole and corner has a board threatening prosecution, and if you pass two or three stopping in the street, their conversation will be about law, hanging, or trade?" Gardner's last ship was the _Brunswick_, on which one Rea was captain of marines. "Rea," says Gardner, "although a very worthy fellow, had a great antipathy to the West Indies, and was always cursing Venables and Perm for taking possession of Jamaica, and was sorry Oliver Cromwell did not make them a head shorter for their pains. I have often heard him repeat the following lines as a morning and evening hymn:-- "'Venables and Perm, Two bloody-minded men, In an evil hour Those seas did explore, And, blundering about, This cursed hole found out; And for so doing The devil has them stewing; And with him they may remain Till we come this way again, Which we think, howsomdever, (As our boatswain says) will be never, And let all the men say Amen.'" On one glad morning, however, news at last came that peace was declared and the _Brunswick_ was to return home and its crew paid off. The master brought the glad tidings, thundering at Gardner's door at five in the morning, and singing this lusty song:-- "'Jolly tars, have you heard the news? There's peace both by land and by sea; Great guns are no more to be used, Disbanded we all are to be.' 'Oh,' says the admiral, 'the wars are all over.' Says the captain, 'My heart it will break.' 'Oh,' says the bloody first lieutenant, 'What course of life shall I take?'" But the news was false, and the _Brunswick_ was sent back to Jamaica again, and so dispirited was he that Gardner then left the sea for ever. It is our gain that he carried away from it a marvellous memory. But I think he knew he had made a mistake in leaving, for there is much wistfulness between the lines of his story. In one place he writes: "We used to fit a tarpaulin in the weather fore-rigging as a screen, and many a pleasant hour have I passed under its lee, with a glass of grog, and hearing long-winded stories. Alas! how dead are times now."