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Updated: June 21, 2025
In the meantime, four other midshipmen swam close to where the girl's athletic brother had been seen to go down. He came up, at last, more than half gone, but the middies pounced upon him and then he was safe. Hal was at the wheel, now, with Williamson and the naval machinist below in the engine room.
In the pleasantly-lit saloon some of the elder subsided into whist, while the juniors sought the middies in their cabin on the main-deck, next door to the sheep-pen; there they entertained themselves and each other with songs, accompanied by the concertina and clouds of tobacco-smoke. The progress of the ship was a subject of constant interest.
It was plain that these young souls had been well tried by the treachery about them. They, too, had felt the pang of the disloyalty of comrades. Nearly a hundred of the boys had been spoilt by the base example of their elders in the repudiating States, and had resigned. After the middies, came anxious citizens from the town. Scared, all of them.
His friends made interest for him in the requisite quarters, and Harry was soon embarked for Bombay, as a midshipman in the East India service; in which office he was known as a "guinea-pig," a humorous appellation then bestowed upon the middies of the Company.
The chaplain, too, was there, having been hastily summoned from his duties of instructing the young middies in the wardroom; as also was the commodore, with a graver face on him than I had ever seen before. I don't know whether he heard my step, or the cry I ejaculated when the doctor spoke of his approaching end.
During that time they had an average of four sections a day of cadet midshipmen to instruct in the workings of the Pollard type of submarine torpedo boat. During the last few days short cruises were taken on the Severn River, in order that the middies might practise at running the motors and handling the craft.
Instantly uniform caps littered the platform deck. Uniform blouses followed. A group of white-shirted middies raced for the rail. Splash! splash! splash! The water shot up in tiny columns of spray with so many young midshipmen diving overboard. Even Ensign Trahern was startled by the promptness with which his question had been met. "No more men go overboard!" bellowed Mr. Trahern. Splash! splash!
Hence, with many of them, there was some slight undercurrent of feeling over the necessity for taking instruction from such very youthful instructors as Jack Benson, Hal Hastings and Eph Somers. Had any of this latter trio been inclined to put on airs there might have been some disagreeable feeling engendered in the breasts of some of the middies.
Pay they must, by some means or other, for already the Blue Peter was flying at the fore and the Sirius would sail at daylight. If she sailed without them it was very plain that there was an end of their career in the Navy they would be "broke." Small wonder that the three middies were in the last stage of gloom.
The middies live by themselves in the steerage, where, nowadays, they dine off a table, spread with a cloth. But for all these, their modern refinements, in some instances the affairs of their club go sadly to rack and ruin. Indeed, they are something like collegiate freshmen and sophomores, living in the college buildings, especially so far as the noise they make in their quarters is concerned.
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