I drew nearer, that I might not lose a word of what Turner said; and then he narrated, in the following words:-- THE LOSS OF THE ROYAL GEORGE. "Well, messmates, the Royal George was a hundred-gun ship; and what we don't often see now, when I first belonged to her, her guns were all brass. We had brass twenty-four-pounders on our quarterdeck, forecastle, poop, and main deck, brass thirty-twos on our middle deck, and brass forty-two-pounders on our lower deck. In the spring of '82, when we were at Plymouth (about six months before she sunk), it was considered that the brass forty-twos on the lower deck were too heavy for her, so they were put on shore, and we had iron thirty-twos instead. I don't think, myself, it made much difference in the weight of metal, and we were sorry to part with them. We were a flag-ship, you know,-- old Kempenfelt carrying his blue at the mizen,--and our poop lanterns were so large that the men used to get inside them to clean them. She was rather a top-heavy sort of ship, in my opinion, her upper works were so high,--why, we measured sixty-six feet from the keelson up to the taffrail; but still, with proper attention, there was nothing to fear on that score. "Well, it was on the twenty-ninth of August, '82,--that's just fourteen years and about six weeks ago,--that we were lying at Spithead, in company with Lord Howe's fleet of between twenty and thirty sail of the line: there was the Victory, Barfleur, Ocean, and Union, all three-deckers, I recollect, close to us. We were in good repair, not at all leaky, and were to have sailed in two days to join the fleet in the Mediterranean. We had been paid, in consequence of our being about to sail foreign; and we had been paid in golden guineas. I think that, could all the money be collected together, from the pockets of the seamen, the women, and the Jews, who went down in the ship, it would be a very pretty fortune even for a duke's daughter." Here Ben shoved the ale to Turner, who drank a little and proceeded, while Ben took a swig and passed it round.