None cared. The senior officers had other things to do than dry-nurse the young gentlemen. If they eluded the regulations concerning wine bills, whose fault was it? Whose fault if they were so bored and had so lost interest in themselves that in their spare hours they nipped, and smoked “chains,” and talked women? At Osborne and Dartmouth they had been educated. At the age of seventeen and a half they had come to sea, and their education had ceased. The senior officers had other things to do than worry about the young gentlemen’s education. From time to time the Gunnery-Lieutenant would dictate obscure notes about guns that the midshipmen had never seen; or the Torpedo-Lieutenant would mumble over again lectures on Balance Chamber Mechanism and War Heads, of just such a kind as had been given in the training cruiser. There was no system, no syllabus, no timetable, no programme. Sometimes, to the active irritation of all concerned, there was a lecture; more often there was not. There were the yearly sights to be worked out; but these were accomplished on the communal system, and were usually worked backwards, for reasons that will be clear to seamen. Life was a haphazard business, in which the only regular intellectual process was deterioration. One day John discovered that he had forgotten how to integrate, and that all his mathematics was slipping from him. Mechanics, too, was a thing of the past; even the elementary formulæ were forgotten now. Electricity had gone; German had gone utterly; French was going; Chemistry was no more than a vague recollection of apparatus and of the red tie worn by the master who had taught him. “I’ve forgotten everything we ever learnt at Dartmouth,” he confessed. “So have we all,” Dyce answered. Borne in the flagship was one Naval Instructor, who was responsible for all the midshipmen in the squadron. Perhaps he taught the flagship’s midshipmen; but his visits to the other ships were so rare that he was unexpectedly popular. Because it was impossible for him to be in two places at once, it happened that, when the flagship was in one port of the Station and the _Pathshire_ in another, the _Pathshire’s_ midshipmen were delightfully free from his ministrations. Outwardly they rejoiced at this emancipation, complaining only that threepence a day was deducted from the pay of each one of them in order that, in accordance with regulation, the Naval Instructor might be fittingly rewarded for being at Hong-Kong while his paying pupils were at Nagasaki. This seemed unjust. “Our pay from a grateful Admiralty is twenty-one pence a day,” Dyce remarked, “on which, apart from what our people provide, we live like officers and gentlemen. And out of the twenty-one pence three go every day to the upkeep of this N.I., who comes near us about one morning in three months. Now, why the hell should I pay one-seventh of my total income for an education I never receive?”