eyond.

* * * * *

It all started during one of those informal tea-parties the Skipper's
Missus sometimes held in the after-cabin. They were delightful
affairs. You needn't accept the Invitation if you didn't want to;
there was no necessity to put on your best monkey-jacket if you did.
You were just told to "blow in" if you wanted some tea, and then you
made your own toast, and there was China tea, in a big blue-and-white
pot, that scented the whole cabin.

The Skipper's Missus sat by the fire, with her hands linked round her
knees in her habitually graceful and oddly characteristic attitude;
Torps and Jess, those gentle philosophers, occupied the chintz-covered
settee; the A.P. sat on the hearth-rug, cross-legged like a tailor, so
that he could toast and consume the maximum number of muffins with the
minimum amount of exertion; the Junior Watchkeeper, who by his own
admission "went all the bundle on his tea," and the Indiarubber Man,
who was clumsy with a tea-cup, shared the table and a jam-pot, and sat
munching, tranquil-eyed, like a pair of oxen in a stall.

The Captain and the First Lieutenant were rummaging through the drawers
of the knee-hole table in search of an ancient recipe of the former's
for manufacturing varnish of a peculiar excellence wherewith to
beautify the corticene on the aft-deck.

"How are the children?" asked the Torpedo Lieutenant, helping himself
to milk and Jess to a lump of sugar. "Out of quarantine yet?"

"Yes," replied the youthful mother of Georgina, Jane, and Cornelius
James. "At last, poor things! Christmas is such a wretched time to
have measles. No parties, no Christmas-tree----"

The A.P. looked up from the absorbing task of buttering a muffin to his
satisfaction. "D'you remember the Christmas when you all came on
board--wasn't it a rag? I broke my glasses because I was a tiger. I
was that fierce."

"And I was chased by the dockyard police all the way from the Admiral
Superintendent's garden with a young fir-tree under my arm. We had it
for a Christmas-tree in the wardroom. Do you remember?"

They were all old friends, you see, and had served two commissions in
succession with this Captain.

"Isn't it rather hard on the _Chee-si's_?" asked Torps, "being done out
of their parties--no, Jess, three lumps are considered quite enough for
little dogs to consume at one sitting."

The Skipper's Missus looked across the cabin at her husband: "T