“Oh, don’t you believe it. You would be much better off, I assure you, if Winton-Black _did_ put in an appearance. He’s an easygoing old thing, as lazy as they are made, and it would be too much effort for him to chase you much. But his being away leaves the senior snotties’ hands free, and the five seniors we are going to have include some pretty tough customers. I believe Krame, the senior of the lot, who will arrange all our duties and dispose our lives, is--well, Ollenor knows more of him than I do, and _he_ says he’s as bad as we could hope for. Howdray has a name through the fleet--Bull Howdray. He’s usually tight, and pretty violent. Tintern is musical--a bit of an artist, but untrained, of course--quite a decent sort in a mild way; but he sozzles to console himself for the might-have-beens. The other two, Elstone and Banford-Smith, I don’t know much about.” “But how will you intermediate fellows come off, Reedham?” “We?--oh, we shall be all right, I dare say. We’ve had our share of the worst of it. You see, there are four of us: Ollenor and Norgate you’ve met, and then there’s Tommy Hambling, who is keeping the first dog-watch at the moment. If we went quietly we shouldn’t come to much harm, but Norgate and Hambling are always making asses of themselves. They came off to the ship absolutely blind to the world the other night. We thought we had got them down safely, but the silly fools showed the effects next morning. Hambling went bright green in the middle of School, and had to retreat and be sick, which angered the priest; and Norgate--much about the same colour--went off to sleep in the middle of Baring’s Seamanship Lecture. The whole story came out, of course. It seems that Baring saw they were tight the evening before, but didn’t know how bad it was. At any rate, he decided to say nothing about it if they were fit for duty the next morning; but then, when they collapsed during his own lecture there was hell to pay. He told Winton-Black to give them a dozen cuts each, and has stopped all their leave, wine bills and extra bills till further orders. Now they talk about breaking out of the ship when they get to Portland. Norgate says he has an amateur there, though Heaven knows where he finds her. And so it goes on.... Of course, that gets everybody’s back up against us four, and will give Krame an excellent opportunity to make himself objectionable if he is so minded.” “But who is the officer in charge of midshipmen?” Lynwood asked. “The Snotty Walloper? Baring.” “Won’t he see that Krame and the others don’t go too far?” Reedham grinned at them while he lighted his pipe.