"Sail the blurry ship; fight the blurry ship; sink the blurry ship; and go to ell in the blurry ship. That's old Ding-dong." CHAPTER IV OLD DING-DONG "They call you Kit?" The boy started. His name, his pet name that he had not heard for days, on the lips of this block-of-granite little man, who had only spoken so far to snub him. "Mother does, sir--and Gwen." There was silence; only the water talking beneath the ship's bows, as she took the open sea and began to swing to it. "Your father was my friend," continued the voice, less harsh now. "I was a pit-boy; he was a gentleman: we was friends." The voice was gruff again. "Ran away to sea same night--he from the Hall; me from the pit-mouth. Met under the old oak on the green. "'Ready, Bill?' says he. "'Right, sir,' says I. "'Then forge ahead.' "And forge ahead it was, and never parted, till the Lord saw good to come atween us for the time bein at St. Vincent." The voice in the darkness ceased and began again. "Quiberon Bay was our first. Fifty-nine that were. I was powder-monkey on the _Royal George_; he was Hawke's orderly midshipman. St. Vincent our last. And a God's plenty in between. One time Dutchmen; one time Dons; and most all the time the French. Yes, sir," with quiet gusto, "reck'n we saw all the best that was goin in our time, and not a bad time neether--for them as like it, that's to say: seamen and such." He was silent for a time, chewing his memories. And what memories they were!--Had he not sailed under Boscawen in the fifties, when that old sea-dog stood between England and Invasion? Had he not lived to see Napoleon's Eagles brooding over the cliffs of France, intent on the same enterprise?--And between the two, what men, what deeds?--Hawke smashing Conflans in a hurricane; Rodney, gloriously alone, fighting his ship against a fleet; Duncan hammering the Dutch; Sam Hood, Jack Jervis, Nelson, Cuddie Collingwood; and all that grim array of big-beaked, bloody-fisted fighting men who for fifty years had held the narrow seas against all comers. "D'you remember your father?" The old man brooded over the boy. In a dumb and misty way he was puzzling out one of life's mysteries--this long stripling with the eyes sprung somehow from that other long stripling with the eyes, whom he had followed from the pit-mouth fifty years since. "I just remember him coming into the nursery with mother and a candle the night before he sailed the last time, sir, to join Lord Howe." "Ah," mused the old man, "that'd be a week afoor the First o June; and nigh three years afoor he died." He paused again, rummaging in his memory.