"Now, boys," he continued, "you've got to go over the top of that there masthead, climbing right up the rigging on the port side, and coming down to starboard. Let me see which of you will be first to get over the crosstrees, and woe betide the last! Away you go, now, the lot o' ye! 'Way aloft!" It was child's play to me; for, as I told Larrikins the first day I was on board, when he was trying to `pull my leg' with his yarns of the mountainous seas he met in the Channel cruising in the _Martin_, `shinning up the rigging' was no novelty to me. Before you could say `Jack Robinson' I had quickly sprung into the lee rigging; and, clambering up the ratlines and then outward by the futtock shrouds, I gained the top long ere half the rest had started. "Well done, my lad; I see you have been on board a ship before!" cried out the instructor, as I at once proceeded now to climb up to the crosstrees and over the head of the mast. "Look alive, you other chaps! That boy there will have done the job while you are thinking about it. Stir your stumps!" `Ugly' was the last of the lot; and, as I came down on the weather or starboard side of the ship, the wind then blowing from the nor'ard and eastward, he was just trying to creep through `the lubber's hole' into the top. "No you don't," shouted up the instructor after him. "You must climb out by the futtock shrouds, as every proper sailor does." Seeing, however, that poor `Ugly' was quite in a fog, he turned to me as I stepped down from the chains and stood up in front of him, touching my cap to report myself as having accomplished my task. "I say, my boy," said he, "what's your name?" Of course I had to reply to this, and so I told him-- "Tom Bowling, sir." "Ha!" he exclaimed, apparently surprised. "Any relation of that chap in the song who `went aloft and did his duty'?" I grinned. "Yes, sir, I believe so," I said. "Father says as how our family is descended from him." "I can quite believe it," observed the instructor kindly, with a pleasant smile on his face. "At all events, a sailor's blood runs in your veins, my lad; and, as you're such a good climber and know your way up the ratlines, just go up now and show that lubber of a greenhorn how to get up the futtock shrouds without tumbling, and so over the masthead." Accordingly, I raced aloft the second time and soon fetched up to `Ugly,' who, in a mortal funk, was trying to step out from the lower rigging on to the futtock shrouds, which, I may explain for the benefit of those who have not been to sea, stretch out laterally from the mast, and not in towards it, like the ordinary standing rigging below. In spite of his difficulty, however, the surly brute now accepted my help with a very ill grace; muttering under his breath to himself some very unfriendly wishes in my respect, as, with some difficulty, I lugged him up into the top, almost by the scruff of his neck.