“There’s a 94-pounder up there,” said a high officer, who might just have been his grandfather.

“All right, sir,” said the child serenely; “we’ll knock him out.”

He hasn’t knocked him out yet, but he is going to next shot, which in a siege is the next best thing.

In the meantime he has had his gun’s name, “Lady Ellen,” neatly carved on a stone and put up on his emplacement.  Another gun-pit bears the golden legend “Princess Victoria Battery,” on a board elegant beyond the dreams of suburban preparatory schools.  A regiment would have had no paint or gold-leaf; the sailors always have everything.  They carry their home with them, self-subsisting, self-relying.  Even as the constant bluejacket says, “Right Gun Hill up, sir,” there floats from below ting-ting, ting-ting, ting.

Five bells!

The rock-rending double bang floats over you unheard; the hot iron hills swim away.

Five bells—­and you are on deck, swishing through cool blue water among white-clad ladies in long chairs, going home.

O Lord, how long?

But the sailors have not seen home for two years, which is two less than their usual spell.  This is their holiday.

“Of course, we enjoy it,” they say, almost apologising for saving us; “we so seldom get a chance.”

The Royal Navy is the salt of the sea and the salt of the earth also.

THE LAST CHAPTER

BY

VERNON BLACKBURN.

I will give no number to the last chapter of George Steevens’s story of the war.  There is no reckoning between the work from his and the work from this pen.  It is the chapter which covers a grave; it does not make a completion.  A while back, you have read that surrendering wail from the beleaguered city—­a wail in what contrast to the humour, the vitality, the quickness, the impulse, the eagerness of expectation with which his toil in South Africa began!—­wherein he wrote:  “Beyond is the world—­war and love.  Clery marching on Colenso, and all that a man holds dear in a little island under the north star....  To your world and to yourself you are every bit as good as dead—­except that dead men have no time to fill in.”  And now he is dead.  And I have undertaken the most difficult task, at the command—­for in such a case the timorous suggestion, hooped round by poignant apologies, is no less than a command—­of that human creature whom, in the little island under the north star, he held most dear of all—­his wife, to set a copingstone, a mere nothing in the air, upon the last work that came from his pen.  I will prefer to begin with my own summary, my own intimate view of George Steevens, as he wandered in and out, visible and invisible, of the paths of my life.