Mrs. Brierley spread a liberal tea upon the table, but not much appetite attended it. The subject of the assistant stewardess was dropped, and Mrs. Smedley listened with attention, and Julia with fictitious interest, to the conversation that was almost entirely carried on by Hardy and his friend. They had been shipmates, as we have heard--Hardy as midshipman, Smedley as third mate, both occupying the midshipmen's quarters in days when Blackwall Liners used to sail with twelve or fourteen reefers in buttons and badges, who had sole charge of the mizzen-mast, the poop or quarter-deck, the quarter-boats and the gig. John Company's flag was then flying, but they had not served in that employ. They afterward came together, Smedley as chief mate and Hardy as third, in a vessel called the _Asia_, a ship with long skysail poles, a stem nearly as up and down as a cutter's, black as night, half the length of her aft sparkling with round ports. They talked of this ship and of her wonderful passages; how her captain would carry fore, main, and topgallant stu'nsails, and pass by ships which thought they were cracking on with a topgallantsail set over a single reefed topsail. Sailors who have been shipmates love this sort of memories, and it is like watching the coil of the sea--one blue ridge dissolving in the base of another, with the laughter and the thunder of heaving and racing brine--to hear them. Thus they passed the evening, with the help of a little whisky and plenty of tobacco, and Julia, sitting beside Mrs. Smedley, told her story over again, but fully, and Mrs. Smedley talked of her son, who was a young curate of whom she was very proud, not only because of his social importance, but because of his eloquence: she declared that he preached a better sermon, young as he was, than any minister of the gospel in the whole diocese, and the interest Julia took in this matter, though the poor girl was thinking all the time of Hardy and the East Indiaman, charmed Mrs. Smedley.