It was during my time in the _Defence_ that I was so fortunate as to be enabled to save two lives. On one occasion, the ship was lying in the Mersey, and visitors were on board. A party of these was leaving the ship, when their boat was slewed round by the strong tide, and one of them, a big, heavy man, fell into the water. I dived after him. Luckily there was a boat-keeper in the galley secured astern of the ship. He held out a boat-hook, {44} which I caught with one hand, holding up my man with the other. I received the gold medal of the Liverpool Shipwreck Humane Society, and the bronze medal of the Royal Humane Society. The name of the man who fell overboard was Richardson. More than forty years afterwards, the son of Mr. Richardson sent me a kind letter, enclosing a photograph of his father, who had died in 1882, nineteen years after his rescue. "My mother," wrote Mr. J. Richardson, "was in very great terror, as my father could not swim a stroke. He was a very fine man, and this made your task you so quickly undertook not any the easier.... The clothes he wore on that memorable occasion were, after their thorough wetting, too small for him to wear again, so they were cut down for my elder brothers, and were called by them their 'Channel Fleet' clothes, and jolly proud they were to wear them too." The boys' sentiment is pleasing, whether it arose from the exciting fact that Mr. Richardson had fallen overboard in them--a thing which might happen to any gentleman--or from his having in them been picked out by an officer (however junior) of the Channel Fleet. The second occasion when I was successful in saving a man from drowning was in Plymouth Sound. A string of boats from the Fleet carrying liberty men was pulling ashore, when a shore-boat crossed their bows and was run down by the leading boat. I jumped in and held up one of the passengers; and was again awarded the bronze medal of the Royal Humane Society. In the _Defence_, as in my other ships, my Service transgressions were few and venial, as in the case of the signal halliards. My troubles arose from my intervals of relaxation on shore. It is now so long ago that perhaps I may without imprudence relate a sad episode in which I fell under the condemnation of the law, with all that attendant publicity which--as one journalist rather unctuously remarked at the time--is so often worse than the penalty. {45} "_Defence_, PLYMOUTH