The captain’s yeoman had come for a little advice.  He always was after advice—­or information.  A department document had come into the office that day with seventeen endorsements on it, and it had him bluffed.  We all laughed at the face he drew.  “But,” said Dalton, turning on us, “so would most of you be bluffed if one of those winged-out documents came at you for the first time.  But you’re foolish, son Reginald, to be worrying over any little thing like that.  Seventeen endorsements!  What’s seventeen endorsements?  I wonder what you’d think if you’d—­Sit down there and listen to me, and perhaps it’ll be time well spent.  If you don’t learn enough from it to get that C.P.O. you’re after, then—­Well, I won’t call you any names here now.  Listen.”

Now this story of Dalton’s is a classic among yeoman, and only a yeoman should tell it; but not even a yeoman, no matter how gifted he may be with letter file or typewriter, has a rating to tell a story—­no, no more than anybody else aboard ship.  Some of us had heard the story before, and it had always been mangled in the telling, through the teller not knowing all the facts, or having perhaps never met any of the principal characters in it.  But Dalton not only knew the tale from beginning to end; he was, though he would never admit it in a crowd, himself concerned in it.  And now when he began to relate the history of the famous length of hose-pipe, we knew that he would have it right.

“I was in—­well, call her the cruiser Savannah—­this time—­”

“Were you a yeoman, Dallie?”

“Yes, a yeoman, bright Reggie boy; what else d’ y’ think I’d be—­a signal-girl?  A good old ship, the Savannah, and were tied up to the dock at the Navy Yard.”

“Boston yard, was it, Dallie?”

“Never mind what yard it was, son.  And I’ll name no names, either, and then by no accident will there be a general court-martial coming to me some day.  There were three of four other ships fitting out at the same time, and after a while these other three ships got their stores aboard and proceeded to sea, leaving a lot of old gear behind them on the dock.

“We were making ready to pipe water into our ship, when Mr. Kiley, our boson, always a forehanded chap, thought it all a pity to have to use our bran-new hose for that kind of work.  You all know how hose gets lying chafing around with people stepping on it, carts and wagons running over it, coal-dust grinding into it, and so on.  A pity, our boson thought, to subject our nice new hose to that kind of abuse, when in the condemned heap on the dock there was a length of hose that would do the work, and he put it up to Mr. Renner, the officer of the deck at the time.

“Now Mr. Renner was a new-made ensign, and we all of us here been long enough in the service to know how it is about a middy that’s just got his commission.  We all know how it is with ourselves when we first get our C.P.O.—­except you, Reggie, and you’ll get yours some day.  Am I right?  Sure I am.  If there’s one thing on earth we’re going to do then, it’s to live up to regulations.