Unfortunately, this was during the winter months; and, as the training- brig _Martin_, which is attached to the _Saint Vincent_ as a sea-going tender in order to cruise about in the Channel to give the boys practical experience of their profession--like a frolicsome chick hanging round a broody old hen that won't leave her nest--does not go out of harbour till the spring, Mick and I were unable for some time to take advantage of the grand privilege of our rise and really go to sea. We thought the blissful period would never come. But `it's a long lane that knows no turning'; and, winter ebbing away into the flood of spring anon, we, with some ninety and nine other youngsters of the same standing, set sail one fine April morning from Portsmouth Harbour, the _Martin_ slipping her buoy abreast of Blockhouse Fort, and standing out into the Solent under easy canvas, with a fair wind from the nor'-east. A hundred boys are always taken at a time for a month's cruise in the brig, the lot being accompanied by some of the smartest seamen belonging to the complement of the mother training-ship, so that they have every opportunity of picking up now the nautical knowledge necessary to make them worth their salt, in reference both to seamanship and gunnery. We had a pretty fair knock-about time in the Channel, running down to Plymouth and back, having a `sojer's wind,' one that was fair both ways, out and home again; and, though, from this fact, we necessarily made an easy passage of it, some of the boys were woefully seasick, many of them never having been at sea before. Notably among these was Mick. "Bedad!" moaned he, leaning over the side with his dark face turned to pale green that seemed a faint reflection of the water below, into which he looked apparently with the deepest interest as he sacrificed his dearly loved dinner to Neptune, paying the sea-god his dues, "Oi fale, Tom me darlint, as if Oi'd brought up iverythink, faith, since furst Oi jined the ship, an' me boots, begorrah, same in the back of me hid! Wurrah, wurrah, why did Oi ivver come to say? Och, Tom mabouchal, kill me at onst, and be done with it!" I could not help laughing at him, he presented such a contrast to the buoyant lad of my ordinary acquaintance; though, of course, I tried to sympathise with my woe-begone chum. But ere long something occurred which made him, and the others in a like predicament, forget their seasickness in a hurry, all of us having to be as spry as we could. The _Martin_ took the ground! I'll tell you how this happened. We had run up Channel, as I have told you, with a fair wind from the start; but, on our reaching the westernmost end of the Isle of Wight, this turned against us, so that after passing through the Needles we had to beat up the Solent in the teeth of a stiff sou'-easter.