in the Midland shires.  Yet while prize-courts procrastinated, or there was a chance of an appointment by showing their sunburned faces at the Admiralty, so long they would continue to pace with their quarter-deck strut down Whitehall, or to gather of an evening to discuss the events of the last war or the chances of the next at Fladong’s, in Oxford Street, which was reserved as entirely for the Navy as Slaughter’s was for the Army, or Ibbetson’s for the Church of England.

It did not surprise me, therefore, that we should find the large room in which we supped crowded with naval men, but I remember that what did cause me some astonishment was to observe that all these sailors, who had served under the most varying conditions in all quarters of the globe, from the Baltic to the East Indies, should have been moulded into so uniform a type that they were more like each other than brother is commonly to brother.  The rules of the service insured that every face should be clean-shaven, every head powdered, and every neck covered by the little queue of natural hair tied with a black silk ribbon.  Biting winds and tropical suns had combined to darken them, whilst the habit of command and the menace of ever-recurring dangers had stamped them all with the same expression of authority and of alertness.  There were some jovial faces amongst them, but the older officers, with their deep-lined cheeks and their masterful noses, were, for the most part, as austere as so many weather-beaten ascetics from the desert.  Lonely watches, and a discipline which cut them off from all companionship, had left their mark upon those Red Indian faces.  For my part, I could hardly eat my supper for watching them.  Young as I was, I knew that if there were any freedom left in Europe it was to these men that we owed it; and I seemed to read upon their grim, harsh features the record of that long ten years of struggle which had swept the tricolour from the seas.

When we had finished our supper, my father led me into the great coffee-room, where a hundred or more officers may have been assembled, drinking their wine and smoking their long clay pipes, until the air was as thick as the main-deck in a close-fought action.  As we entered we found ourselves face to face with an elderly officer who was coming out.  He was a man with large, thoughtful eyes, and a full, placid face—­such a face as one would expect from a philosopher and a philanthropist, rather than from a fighting seaman.

“Here’s Cuddie Collingwood,” whispered my father.

“Halloa, Lieutenant Stone!” cried the famous admiral very cheerily.  “I have scarce caught a glimpse of you since you came aboard the Excellent after St. Vincent.  You had the luck to be at the Nile also, I understand?”

“I was third of the Theseus, under Millar, sir.”

“It nearly broke my heart to have missed it.  I have not yet outlived it.  To think of such a gallant service, and I engaged in harassing the market-boats, the miserable cabbage-carriers of St. Luccars!”