That stern, incisive voice would rivet all eyes upon the culprit just when the muster by the officer of the day had been completed, and the long ranks awaited the stentorian dismissal of the chief cadet captain. “Mr. Z! You’ll step along to the sick-bay when we falls out.” The blanched smuggler clutched at his momentarily abandoned halo of rectitude. “Sick-bay!” he echoed indignantly. “Why the sick-bay? There’s nothing wrong with me--I swear there isn’t. I never felt better in my life.” “That there nasty swelling on your shin,” was the pitiless reply, “did ought to be seen to at once.” A draught, that had fluttered the carefully selected baggy trousers against their wearer’s legs, had been his undoing. The game was up. Like all truly great men, Harker could unbend without discipline suffering an iota. As the months passed and his term of fledgling “News” acquired the modest dignity of “Threes” (second term cadets), Marker’s methods changed. He was no longer the detective, inquisitor, encyclopædia of a thousand unfamiliar phrases, events, and objects. His term were on their feet now, treading in their turn paths fiercely illumined by the new first term’s gaping admiration and curiosity. They were an example. “’Ow long ’ave we been in the _Britannia_?” he would demand reproachfully when some breach of the laws called for reproof. “’Ere we are in our second term, an’ talkin’ about HUP-STAIRS!” The scorn in his voice was like a whiplash. “When you young gentlemen goes to sea you won’t find no STAIRS!” When they went to sea! That was the gradually increasing burden of his song. For a while it presented a picture too remote almost for serious contemplation. It was practically a figure of speech, meaningless. But as time went on, and the successive dignities of “Sixer” and “Niner” (third and fourth--the last--terms) loomed up and passed into reality, and at last the Great Wall of the final examination alone stood between them and the sea-going gunrooms of the Fleet, the words took on their real significance. Harker abandoned even sarcasm. He became guide, philosopher, and friend, a patient mentor always accessible--generally somewhere on the chest-deck--in leisure hours to thirsters after knowledge. Was one shaky in that branch of nautical lore known as “Bends and Hitches”? Harker’s blunt fingers tirelessly manipulated the end of a hammock-lashing until the pupil could make even a “sheep-shank” with his eyes shut. Another would bring him, in a welter of grease and ravelled strands, a tortured mass of hemp-rope. “It’s meant to be a Long Splice,” was the explanation, “but I don’t seem to get it right--ever,” and with a despondent sigh it would be thrust into Harker’s hands. Harker would examine the interwoven strands, twisting it to and fro with jerks of his powerful wrists, pulling taut here, tucking something in there, and lo! the thing took shape.