The Admiral, Captain Acton, and Captain Weaver stood in the gangway to receive the officer, a man whose portrait should be painted by the caricaturing brush of a Michael Scott. He was this side of forty, and a great Roman nose stood out like a flying jib between two gaunt cheeks whose hollows when he was silent made you think he was sucking in his breath. He wore a pigtail under a very old, tarnished cocked hat. His uniform coat was scarcely held together by the tailor's thread, and appeared to have travelled a score of times round the world in an age when a voyage round the world was regarded as something more prodigious than we should now consider a voyage to the moon, if such a journey were practicable. His shoes were rusty; his hose had gone into mourning over an absence of soap that was all the same as the death of his laundress. Yet despite a garb that made a travesty of the human figure there was something distinguished and even noble in the man's bearing. It was to be seen at once (and no masterful capacity of penetration was needed) that in this officer was the gentleman of old blood, poor and proud, a loyal subject whose heart's life was at the service of his King and country.,
"Take meself," he went on, drawing his stool closer to the chairs of his young friends. "All me life have I dhrunk more er less av the cup that cheers; but I'm through now, byes, not so much either because ut's a fit av the blue divils the stuff give me but because I mane from now on to quaff the swate draft of Nature widout a bad taste in me mouth. I'm through wid whisky feriver, and ut's Harry O'Dule, siventh son av a siventh son, so declares himself this day. Ut's out into God's blissid sunlight have I come afther bein' held prisoner by a deadlier disease than measles, me byes.",
"Lucy told me at breakfast this morning that on going to bed last night she noticed a faint tinge in the air as of the rising moon[Pg 5] away to the eastward. 'Twas the burning wreck, I presume?".
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