“Now the commandant was a good old soul, too, and nothing would have pleased him better than to accommodate his old friend and classmate, the captain of the Savannah; but seeing this thing come to him in such formal style, and himself being just off a three-years’ cruise, and always a little doubtful about these port regulations, anyway, and wanting to do things up in a seaman-like way, he turns to his chief clerk and says, ‘What do we do about this?’

“Now what the commandant meant and what he would have said, if he’d put it in more words, was:  ’I want the Savannah to have the use of that condemned hose, but I suppose there are certain formalities to be observed, and your business is to know what these formalities are.  Here, you attend to these formalities, but see that the Savannah gets the use of the hose.’  That’s about how he would have put it aboard ship, but he hadn’t quite savvied this shore-going chief clerk at his elbow.  Toward him he didn’t have that same sea-going feeling that he’d have toward one of his old ship’s crew.

“And the chief clerk wasn’t the kind that lost sleep trying to make trouble for anybody; but he was the combination of being twenty-five years on one job and having a manager of a wife—­an upstanding, marine-sergeant sort of a woman, with the beam and bows of a battleship, and an eye—­oh, an eye!—­and the chief clerk and his missus, they’d just finished paying for their house over in the city, and they’d had to scrimp and scrape for the Lord knows how many years to get it paid for, and there was a marriageable daughter to provide for, and his wife never let him forget that he mustn’t risk their real estate or jeopardize his job or the marrying prospects of the daughter, who was just getting to where she was making a lot of desirable acquaintances.  There was a young staff officer, a passed assistant surgeon, within easy range, and there was a young paymaster above the horizon, and no telling but they might yet capture one of the line, and that was all the old lady needed to be happy.  But if papa was shifted to another city, they’d have to sell the house at a sacrifice and start making friends, all over again.  They say that the chief clerk used to get his instructions every morning like it was the uniform of the day.  Above all things he must never do anything that the department or any superior officer could ever censure him for.

“He was a little man, the chief clerk, with an upturned moustache he was always flattening fan-wise.  ‘Heels’ they used to call him at the yard, because he was so sensitive about his height that he wore regular female opera-singer’s heels on his shoes.  Some said his wife made him wear them.  Even then he only came up to the top of her ear.  Well, Heels considers things now, and recollecting that this would come under the jurisdiction of the captain of the yard, and that the captain of the yard had his little spells, he says to the commandant, ’I think, sir, we’ll have to refer it.’