'
"'Nineteen? H'm! Then by this time you probably know a little something
of the ways that shore-going departments invent to worry us poor fellows
to sea,' He held up the hose-pipe thing. 'You've seen this before,
Willoughby?'
"'Oh yes, sir,' says Willoughby."
"'I dare say, and so have I, and if there's a sea-going or shore-going
officer in the service that hasn't bumped into it, then he must have
been on the sick-list for the last few dozen years. Well, Willoughby, do
you take it, this nightmare--that I thought was dead and buried a dozen
times--take it and study it over, from alow and aloft, from for'ard and
aft, inside and outside and topside and 'tween-decks, from mast-head to
keelson, from figure-head to jack-staff; study it and stay with it, and
from out of your nineteen years' experience--and you're no green
apprentice-boy, Willoughby--see if you can't construct an endorsement
that will lay the damned ghost of it for good and all.'
"'Aye, aye, sir,' says the trusty yeoman, and takes it off to his office
and looks it over. A wonderful thing it was by now, with its sixty-seven
endorsements winged out on the back of it. Just to read them took the
Admiral's yeoman an hour, and he wasn't too slow a reader, either. Well,
he spreads it out and sizes it up. And sucks three pipefuls, and takes a
cruise down the passageway and has a chat with his old-time shipmates,
the boson and the gunner.
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