“D’you read Algernon Blackwood?... Ee.... More fun to spin the yarns yourself. Mm? Now, if ever you get writing, don’t lose a sense of Eternity. That’s what the modern people lack. Brilliant enough: dozens of women--acid mostly; brilliant like chandeliers, though--not stars. So taken up with their own few years they forget the rest. Scramble for the nuts; forget the tree; forget the forest; forget the hawk overhead. That’s why Hardy sits in the inner parlour with the giants and all the others rattle their mugs in the taproom. Know Hardy? Every word a new link in chain from Adam; every kiss taught by Eve. Sense of Eternity.... Sense of Eternity makes a watch pass quicker. Read Gibbon, boy, when the Commander curses----” “Light on the port bow, sir!” sang the look-out in the foretop. “Aye, aye.... Take a bearing, boy.” He took off his cap and flung it on to the bridge below. “Ee.... Signalman o’ the Watch--my cap. Dropped it. Bring it.” And when the Signalman had come and gone he added to John: “Must keep them awake. Must remind ’em I’m here. They like it. Bad for morals to stare too long at the sea. Breaks the morbid current if you bash things about. That’s why Cabinet Ministers ought to have Jesters with balloons. Smack on the head with a balloon restores sense of proportion. Mm?... What was the bearing?... Take the Corporal of the Watch with you and go the Rounds.” Almost any occasion--especially the solemn and pompous--might be enlivened by the flight of the First Lieutenant’s cap. Once he had hurled it, without explanatory comment, into the midst of the ship’s company when they were engaged in prayer during quarter-deck Church. “Sorry, padre,” he said afterwards. “Forgot about you. Fellow talking. Had to stop him. No other means of communication.” II After the Mikado’s funeral the _Pathshire_ visited Vladivostok and Nagasaki before returning to Wei-hai-wei. The way of life ran smooth, and seemed to John to run the smoother because for him its direction might so soon be changed. His hope, at first so weak, of a favourable answer from his mother, had fed upon itself, until at last it had become almost a conviction. He had ceased to think of his future as that of a naval officer.