a civilian, smiling in all the rotundity and fat of a very pleasant
countenance, and very plain clothes, and forming a striking contrast to
the grim complacency, and the ironbound civility, of the two men in
uniform.

The boat's crew were so much struck with this apparent anomaly--for to
them, anything in the civilian's garb to come near an officer, and that
officer a naval one, was hardly less than portentous, and argued the
said civilian to be something belonging to the _genus homo_
extraordinary--and the fat specimen in the boat with the port-admiral,
they thought, was one of the lords of the Admiralty, or even Mr Croker
himself--the notion of whose dimly-understood attributes was, with them,
of a truly magnificent nature. Whoever this person was, he was
carefully assisted up the side of our ship, and remained on board for
about an hour, whilst we were burning with curiosity and eagerness to be
on board to satisfy it, and forced to do our best to allay this
tantalising passion, by hauling along tallied bights of rope, and
rousing old hawsers out, and new hawsers into the boat--a more pleasant
employment may be easily imagined for a raw, cold, misty day in winter.

I regarded all these operations very sapiently, knowing as yet nothing
of the uses, or even of the names, of the different stores that I was
delivering and receiving. The boatswain was with me, of course: but
notwithstanding that I had positive orders not to let the men stray away
from the duty they were performing--as this official told me, after we
had done almost everything that we had come on shore to perform, that he
must borrow two of the men to go up with him to the storekeeper's
private house, to look out for some strong fine white line with which to
bowse up the best bower anchor to the spanker-boom-end, when the ship
should happen to be too much down by the stern, I could not refuse to
disobey my orders upon a contingency so urgent. And there he left me,
for about two hours, shivering in the boat; and, at length, he and the
men came down, with very little white line in exchange for his not very
white tie; and truly, they had been bowsing-up something; for Mr
Lushby, the respectable boatswain, told me, with very great
condescension, that he was a real officer, whilst I was nothing but a
living walking-stick, for the captain to swear at when he was in a bad
humour; and that he had no doubt but that I should get mast-headed when
I got on board, f