On the day before we sailed from Sheerness, the captain had an order conveyed to the first-lieutenant to send me away on duty immediately, for two or three hours. I was bundled into the pinnace with old canvas, old ropes, and old blocks, condemned stores to the dock-yard, and, as I approached the landing-place appropriated for the use of admirals _in posse_, I saw embark from the stairs, exclusively set apart for admirals and post-captains _in esse_, my captain and the port-admiral in the admiral's barge, and seated between these two awful personages, there sat a civilian, smiling in all the rotundity and fat of a very pleasant countenance, and very plain clothes, and forming a striking contrast to the grim complacency, and the ironbound civility, of the two men in uniform. The boat's crew were so much struck with this apparent anomaly--for to them, anything in the civilian's garb to come near an officer, and that officer a naval one, was hardly less than portentous, and argued the said civilian to be something belonging to the _genus homo_ extraordinary--and the fat specimen in the boat with the port-admiral, they thought, was one of the lords of the Admiralty, or even Mr Croker himself--the notion of whose dimly-understood attributes was, with them, of a truly magnificent nature. Whoever this person was, he was carefully assisted up the side of our ship, and remained on board for about an hour, whilst we were burning with curiosity and eagerness to be on board to satisfy it, and forced to do our best to allay this tantalising passion, by hauling along tallied bights of rope, and rousing old hawsers out, and new hawsers into the boat--a more pleasant employment may be easily imagined for a raw, cold, misty day in winter.