In two or three days’ time the dogs always returned, lean, dirty, and heartily ashamed of themselves.  For the whole of the next day they were invariably tied up in disgrace.  On the day after they were scrubbed clean, and were formally re-admitted to the dining-room.  There, Civilization, acting through the subtle medium of the Saucepan, recovered its hold on them; and the admiral’s two prodigal sons, when they saw the covers removed, watered at the mouth as copiously as ever.

Old Mazey, in his way, proved to be just as disreputably inclined on certain occasions as the dogs.  At intervals, the original wildness in his nature broke out; he, too, lost all relish for the comforts of home, and ungratefully left the house.  He usually disappeared in the afternoon, and returned at night as drunk as liquor could make him.  He was by many degrees too seasoned a vessel to meet with any disasters on these occasions.  His wicked old legs might take roundabout methods of progression, but they never failed him; his wicked old eyes might see double, but they always showed him the way home.  Try as hard as they might, the servants could never succeed in persuading him that he was drunk; he always scorned the imputation.  He even declined to admit the idea privately into his mind, until he had first tested his condition by an infallible criterion of his own.

It was his habit, in these cases of Bacchanalian emergency, to stagger obstinately into his room on the ground-floor, to take the model-ship out of the cupboard, and to try if he could proceed with the never-to-be-completed employment of setting up the rigging.  When he had smashed the tiny spars, and snapped asunder the delicate ropes—­then, and not till then, the veteran admitted facts as they were, on the authority of practical evidence.  “Ay! ay!” he used to say confidentially to himself, “the women are right.  Drunk again, Mazey—­drunk again!” Having reached this discovery, it was his habit to wait cunningly in the lower regions until the admiral was safe in his room, and then to ascend in discreet list slippers to his post.  Too wary to attempt getting into the truckle-bed (which would have been only inviting the catastrophe of a fall against his master’s door), he always walked himself sober up and down the passage.  More than once Magdalen had peeped round the screen, and had seen the old sailor unsteadily keeping his watch, and fancying himself once more at his duty on board ship.  “This is an uncommonly lively vessel in a sea-way,” he used to mutter under his breath, when his legs took him down the passage in zigzag directions, or left him for the moment studying the “Pints of the Compass” on his own system, with his back against the wall.  “A nasty night, mind you,” he would maunder on, taking another turn.  “As dark as your pocket, and the wind heading us again from the old quarter.”  On the next day old Mazey, like the dogs, was kept downstairs in disgrace.  On the day after, like the dogs