"Humph! He's a fine grown young chip for his age. What are you going to make of him? He ought to be a sailor and serving the Queen by now, like his father before him!" Father `hummed' and `hawed,' not knowing what to answer to this; while I burned all over with joy at having so potent an advocate coming to my aid in this unexpected way. Captain Mordaunt saw this: though anybody could have seen it from one glance at my face; for if I grinned `like a Cheshire cat eating green cheese' on ordinary occasions, as father used to say, why, I must have looked now as if I had bolted all the cheese in one lump, and it had stuck in my throat, keeping my mouth open on the stretch! So, noticing this, father's old friend put the question to me point- blank. "I think, youngster, you've pretty well made up your mind already in the matter, if I'm not very much mistaken," said he to me, as I unshipped my oar and stood up in the bow of the wherry, ready to fend her off from the pontoon as we ran up alongside, right under the stern of one of the Ryde steamers that was just backing out from the railway pier above us. "You'd like to go to sea, young Tom, I'm sure, eh?" "There's nothing I should like better, sir," I answered glibly enough, catching hold of one of the piles of the pier with my boathook and bringing up the wherry easily to the landing-stage. "I only wish you'd coax my father, sir, to let me be a sailor!" "Now, Bowling, my old friend," said this new ally of mine, who, it struck me, would turn out to be a very important factor in this decision anent my future destiny, "the matter rests entirely with you. `Toby or not Toby,' as Hamlet says in the play. Is your son, young Tom here, to go to sea or not?" Father took off his hat with his right hand and scratched his head deliberately and deliberatively with his left, `humming' and `hawing' over this crucial question. "Well, sir--Cap'en Mordaunt that is, begging your pardon, sir, ag'in," said he--"as you goes on to make sich a favour on it, sir, we'll see about it, sir." "See about it?--Stuff and nonsense, Bowling, my man, that won't do for me!" exclaimed the other, as, resting his hand lightly on my shoulder as he crossed the thwarts, he stepped out of the wherry on to the landing- stage. "I tell you what it is, young Tom must go to sea, my man--aye, and to-morrow too!" "Lor' sakes, you're just the same, sir, as you were aboard the old _Blazer_ twenty years ago!" said father, breaking into a regular horse- laugh, which he never did except something particularly funny tickled his fancy. "You allers gave your orders sharp as a youngster, and some of us used for to call you `Commander Jack' sometimes. Lor', I remembers it all as if it wer' but yesterday!"