most of you be bluffed if one of those winged-out documents came
at you for the first time. But you're foolish, son Reginald, to be
worrying over any little thing like that. Seventeen endorsements!
What's seventeen endorsements? I wonder what you'd think if you'd--Sit
down there and listen to me, and perhaps it'll be time well spent. If
you don't learn enough from it to get that C.P.O. you're after,
then--Well, I won't call you any names here now. Listen."

Now this story of Dalton's is a classic among yeoman, and only a yeoman
should tell it; but not even a yeoman, no matter how gifted he may be
with letter file or typewriter, has a rating to tell a story--no, no
more than anybody else aboard ship. Some of us had heard the story
before, and it had always been mangled in the telling, through the
teller not knowing all the facts, or having perhaps never met any of the
principal characters in it. But Dalton not only knew the tale from
beginning to end; he was, though he would never admit it in a crowd,
himself concerned in it. And now when he began to relate the history of
the famous length of hose-pipe, we knew that he would have it right.

"I was in--well, call her the cruiser _Savannah_--this time--"

"Were you a yeoman, Dallie?"

"Yes, a yeoman, bright Reggie boy; what else d' y' think I'd be--a
signal-girl? A good old ship, the _Savannah_, and were tied up to the
dock at the Navy Yard."

"Boston yard, was it, Dallie?"

"Never mind what yard it was, son. And I'll name no names, either, and
then by no accident will there be a general court-martial coming to me
some day. There were three of four other ships fitting out at the same
time, and after a while these other three ships got their stores aboard
and proceeded to sea, leaving a lot of old gear behind them on the dock.

"We were making ready to pipe water into our ship, when Mr. Kiley, our
boson, always a forehanded chap, thought it all a pity to have to use
our bran-new hose for that kind of work. You all know how hose gets
lying chafing around with people stepping on it, carts and wagons
running over it, coal-dust grinding into it, and so on. A pity, our
boson thought, to subject our nice new hose to that kind of abuse, when
in the condemned heap on the dock there was a length of hose that would
do the work, and he put it up to Mr. Renner, the officer of the deck at
the time.

"Now Mr. Renner was a new-made ensign, and we all of us here been long
enough