_Maunder_: (coming in a little behind, chanting, the general effect being that of a duet in canon). One strawberry ice one doughnut one stick cream chocolate one bottle barley sugar one “My Queen,” etc., etc., etc.... _And_ a bag one an thruppence ’a’-penny.... Thank you, sir. Next, please. * * * * * On occasion demigods walked among the children of men. The visits of the Channel Fleet to Torbay usually brought over one or two of a lately departed term, now midshipmen by the grace of God and magnificent beyond conception. It was their pleasure, these immaculately clad visitors, to enter the canteen, greet Maunder with easy familiarity and Miss Maunder with something approaching gallantry, slap down a sovereign on the counter and cry free stodge all round. They would even unbend further, dallying with a strawberry ice in token of their willingness to be as other men, and finally depart in a cloud of cigarette smoke and hero-worship. This record is not concerned with the fact that on their return on board their ship, some hours later, one suffered stripes for having forgotten to lock his chest before he went ashore, and the other, being the most junior of all the junior midshipmen, was bidden swiftly to unlace the sub’s boots and fetch his slippers. To every dog his day. * * * * * Random memories such as these necessarily present individuals and incidents, not in the sequence of their importance in the cosmos as one sees it now, but as they appeared to the vision of the Naval Cadet, whose world was an amiable Chaos. Thus the Captain flickers through this kaleidoscope an awesome bearded figure, infinitely remote from the small affairs of that teeming rabbit-warren of youth. More readily comes to mind the picture of his lady wife, white-haired, with clear eyes and gentle voice, a memory somehow entangled with geraniums in red pots about the moulded stern-gallery and tea on Sunday afternoons in the spacious chintz-draped after-cabin: with irksome football sprains, and brief puerile illnesses made more endurable by her visits to the cotside. The Commander, though less awesome than the Captain, approached the mortal in that he stooped at times to wrath. His was the cold eye before which the more hardened malefactors quailed; his the rasping voice that jerked the four terms to attention at Divisions each morning: “Young Gentlemen, ’shun!” The English public schoolboy is conscious of youth, and takes the fact of being a gentleman for granted. But to hear himself addressed by a designation that combined both qualities was a never-staling subject for inward mirth and a weird self-congratulation difficult of analysis. It conveyed a hint of coming manhood and responsibilities: it was the voice of the Navy, bending on the leading strings, heard for the first time.