'Makes us awfully handy with our feet, said Twenty-One, mopping himself in the pauses of a waltz. 'Won't you take a turn? No end good exercise.'
'No, I'm afraid of the ladies,' I replied.
'They are rather solid,' said Twenty-One reflectively, as a Post-Captain reversed on to his toes. 'My partner doesn't protect me as a gentleman should. He threw me at a Paymaster just now.'
How in the course of their work they had saved up enough energy for this diversion was beyond me. They danced, fair heel and toe, unsparingly a couple of hours, for the sheer, downright exercise of it. And they were by no means all youths in the game either. We dropped panting into the boats, and saw behind us the whole gay show fade, flicker, and twinkle out. The Flagship had returned to her ordinary business. To-morrow she would take us back to Portland on our speed trials. *******
NO. 2 WELSH COAL
'Isn't it scandalous? Isn't it perfectly damnable?' said an officer after we had got under way, pointing to the foul, greasy columns of smoke that poured from every funnel. 'Her Majesty's Channel Squadron, if you please, under steam, burning horse-dung.'
Truthfully, it was a sickening sight. We could have been seen thirty miles off, a curtain of cloud, spangled and speckled with bits of burning rubbish and lumps of muck. The First Lieutenant looked at the beach of clinkers piling up on his hammock-nettings and blessed the Principality of Wales. The
