This would have been a pity; for, really, he was a very good-looking chap, and I am sure my sister Jenny, though she wouldn't confess it, would have been sorry if anything had occurred to mar his comely face. It happened thus. When skylarking together on the upper deck one evening, Mick and another fellow caught up a couple of cutlasses that had been left inadvertently lying about the deck, and they commenced pointing and cutting and slashing at one another with the keen-edged weapons, just as if they had been mere basket-hilted single-sticks, a rap from which would have done no damage beyond a bruise. They were going it in fine style, when all at once Mick's foot slipped; and, missing his guard as his opponent made a vicious cut `one' at him, he received this on his chest, the cutlass cutting through his jumper and flannel and making a slight wound across his breastbone. Had his head not been thrown backwards as he slipped, poor Mick would have had the most striking feature of his merry countenance sliced off as dexterously as if it had been a carrot! The last seven weeks of my experiences of the old ship, which I had begun to look upon as much my home as the little cottage at Bonfire Corner, were devoted to practice with the big guns that are used in modern ships of war; and these, I may add, are so unlike the old twenty- four and thirty-two and sixty-four pounders that had been used in our early training, that any drill with them would have failed to have been of much assistance to us in getting the cross-cannon badge on our sleeve. So, for these seven weeks, all of us first-class boys who were near the end of our term had to go to the _Excellent_ every day to go through a course of gunnery; and were sent out to sea in sections in the _Blazer_ or _Handy_, or some other gunboat attached to the gunnery school, so as to gain some sort of preliminary insight into the ways of the big breech-loading guns used in the armour-clads of to-day, as well as being made acquainted with their lesser satellites quick-firing and machine- guns. We did not leave our old ship altogether yet, though; for we used to take our dinners with us when we went away from her of a morning, returning back to the _Saint Vincent_ of a night to sleep, when we would retail all of our experiences to our comrades who had remained behind. At last the day came, a day I shall remember all my life, when Mick and I, for we both went away together even as we had joined on the same day, left the _Saint Vincent_ for good and all.