ntlemen,
there were a number of sons of merchants and city people."

"Ah! that is just what there should be," said Jack. "It is the very
thing that keeps England so well together. When the gentle born you
speak of find that the sons of city men are as gentlemanly, as clever,
and as honourable as themselves, and can play cricket or leapfrog, or
anything of that sort, perhaps better than they do, they learn to
respect them, and treat them as their equals ever afterwards. That is
one of the very things that made our school so good. We used to think
of fellows not for what they were but for what they did--except,
perhaps, a few miserable sneaks, who `carnied' up to a fellow because he
had a handle to his name."

Pigeon did not respond to this sentiment, because he had been noted far
doing the very thing that Jack reprobated.

Jack could not help describing Pigeon in the berth, and the general
opinion was that he deserved to be well roasted while he remained on
board--in other words, that he should be made the common butt, at which
the shafts of their wits should be aimed.

They had plenty of opportunities of shooting the said shafts, for Pigeon
exhibited an almost incredible amount of simplicity in all things
connected with the sea. I do not mean to say, for one moment, that they
were right in playing off their jokes on Pigeon. I have an especial
dislike to practical jokes; and those I have generally seen carried out
have been decidedly wrong, and very senseless and stupid, without a
particle of wit.

They had not been long at sea when one night Pigeon was encountered
walking the deck, and every now and then stopping and looking eagerly
over the side.

"What do you see there?" asked Jack. "Anything out of the common way?"

"All those sparkles, what can they be?" exclaimed Pigeon, pointing to
the flashes of phosphorescent light which played among the foam dashed
off from the sides, and which were seen in the wake of the vessel.

Hemming came by at the moment. He had taken an especial dislike to the
bully. "Those sparkles! don't you know what they are? I thought
everybody did," he observed, in a tone of contempt. "Well, there's a
Russian fleet just gone up through the Straits, and every man, woman,
and child aboard them smokes, from the admiral to the admiral's baby,
and those are the ashes out of their pipes and off the ends of their
cigars. Why, that's nothing to what you sometimes see. If we were
clo