To this time, too, belong my memories of a certain famous naval captain, who was extraordinarily particular both as to his own dress and the wearing of proper uniform by others. His regard for appearances, however, {119} did not prevent his diving overboard in full and immaculate uniform, including white gloves, to save a seaman. Exceedingly precise in his speech, he owned the singular trait of becoming deprived of utterance when he was angry; and few things made him more angry than faulty attire in the Service. He was driving with me in a cab towards Plymouth, when we met an old warrant officer, who was wearing a purple woollen waistcoat and green gloves. My friend, stopping the cab so suddenly that the horse slithered along on its haunches, leaped from the vehicle. The old warrant officer, his attention arrested, had halted and turned round. My friend went up to him. Then I perceived that he was stricken speechless with wrath; for, continuing to swallow nothing, as his habit was in these crises of emotion, he tapped the warrant officer's waistcoat and gloves. Glaring at him and still silently swallowing, he turned about and got into the cab. The old warrant officer stood staring with dropped jaw, like a man petrified. It was my friend who, being asked at a court-martial what he would have done in certain difficult circumstances, replied deliberately: "If I was where I was not I might have done something I did not do." In after years, when he was commander-in-chief at the Nore, he was walking along the road to Sheerness, dressed in plain clothes, when a bluejacket, who was slightly intoxicated, lurched against him. "Man, man," said my friend, with his picked elocution, "do you know what you are doing? Man, you are colliding with the commander-in-chief." "Ho," returned the seaman, totally unimpressed. "Har you, indeed? Then all I've got to say, is to say you've got a ruddy good billet--an' wha's more, you take care you don't lose it by getting drunk." Despite of my diversions, I did a good deal of hard work. As flag-lieutenant I was in charge of the signalling, a {120} science which, as it was understood in those days, I mastered completely. My first independent command was the _Goshawk_ gunboat, to which I was appointed as lieutenant-commander for the manoeuvres and for review in 1873, while I was still flag-lieutenant to Sir Harry Keppel. I had a narrow escape from disaster at the very beginning. Fortunately I noticed that the navigator was going the wrong side of the buoy off Drake's Island, and I was just in time to point out his mistake. I remember my feeling of horror at the prospect of running on a rock in Plymouth Sound in my first command.