Lying there with set mouth, and stubborn chin, in death, as in life, he was old Ding-dong still. II Kit could not bury the old man: he had no tools. He could not stay with him: time pressed. What he could, he did with the tenderness of a woman, and the respect of a midshipman for the bravest of the brave. He arranged the body orderly, straightening the legs and pulling down the coat. As he did so, he felt something bulky in the flaps. He looked. It was a little old leather-bound New Testament, sea-soaked; and between the leaves of it the Articles of War. The book fell open at the fly-leaf. On it three names were written, each in a different hand. _Horatio Nelson, Christopher Caryll, William Harding._ A bracket bound the three, and opposite the bracket, in the same hand as the first name, the words, _England and Duty_. The date was a week before St. Vincent. The fly-leaf turned. On the back of it, in the great vague hand of a peasant-woman, rheumatic-ridden, _bili from mother Xmas_ 1755 _be a good boy_. Kit read the inscription with full throat. In his chest, awaiting him at the Bridge at Newhaven, there was such another book, with such another inscription, from such another mother--given him the night before his setting out on his life's voyage, she sitting on his bed with rather a rainy smile. The old man had left him that little sea-worn book with his last breath; but he could not take it, perhaps the last gift from mother to son. It had seen the old man through his life; in it were to be found the Fighting Instructions which had led him on through fifty years of battle to the last great Victory; in death the two should not be divided. He laid the book on the old man's breast, and his sword beside him, as he remembered his mother had done when Uncle Jacko Gordon died. What more could he do? It seemed an ill thing to desert the old man; to leave him alone among the sea-birds. Yet he must. Putting his arm round the other, he raised his head; then thrust a boulder between the dead man's shoulders to prop him. A moment he knelt beside the old Commander with closed eyes. Then he bent and kissed the chill forehead. "Good-bye, sir," he said in breaking voice, and rising to his feet saluted. III Old Ding-dong was left alone: his back against the white cliffs for which he had lived and died; his head with a skyward cock; his gaze seaward to where, when the mists rose with the morning, he would see the Colours of his Country waving above those waters that he, and his peers, had made hers for ever. The old man asked no more. Tired now, he wished to be alone with his sword, his Bible, and his memories. CHAPTER XXI KIT STARTS ON HIS MISSION The boy blew his nose, and set off along the foot of the cliff, the scent-bottle in his hand.