The widower held his handkerchief in his fist, but owing to the heat of a discussion on the manner the Navy had gone to the dogs—or returned from them—since the Admiralty had set up a gunnery school on a Portsmouth ship, he used it only to mop his brow.
“Excellent, indeed!” He was mocking at the ship’s name. “The ruination of the sarvice I tell you. It all comes from doing away with the pressgang—stands to reason they picked out the finest chaps—” here the Gaffer snorted—“Oh you may sniff, but for fighting you want guts and muscle. Look what England was in them days and what she is coming to now.”
“To my lookin’-at-it-an’-thinkin’-o’t-too”—the Gaffer made one breathless word of it—“’tis a blessin’ to be riddy of all them gaolbirds, swearers, drinkers, smokers, and fornicators.”
“Hush!” The Commander tried to wink his glass eye towards Jinny.
“She don’t understand. Oi remember, the year my good-for-nawthen Gabriel smashed up a threshin’-machine (and the poor farmer dedn’t git no compensation neither, though ef his furniture had been smashed ’twould have come on the Hundred) that wery same year Ebenezer Wagstaff—for ’twas the coronation year of King William, Oi remember, just afore my Emma desarted me——”
“That was a Sailor King,” interrupted Dap, half to stave off fulminations against Jinny’s dead mother. “Began as middy under Cap’n Digby in the unlucky _Royal George_—a ninety-eight gun ship she was——”
“Ye put me off the track, drat ye, aldoe it leads back to Ebenezer Wagstaff all the same, seein’ as the Prince might ha’ rubbed showlders with a thief as was sentenced for stealin’ half-a-suvran from a barge on the Brad. He could ha’ been hanged for it in them days, mind you—the case bein’ as clear as day or rather as black as night. But they marcifully brought him in guilty to stealin’ nine and ’levenpence and that saved his neck, being a navigable river, and the judge give him the option of gaol or jinin’ the Navy.”
“And a proper thing too. Set a thief to catch a Frenchy, and him used to taking prizes by water. Nowadays before the captain hoists his pennant he’s got a crew dumped on him that’s no choice of his—mealy-mouthed lubbers, full of book-larnin’, who don’t know a brigantine from a topsail schooner: it’s the red ensign that gets all the good stuff, not the white. You mark me, it’ll be the downfall of England.”