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Updated: May 8, 2025
After one hour's deliberation, and notwithstanding it was the first night I had ever been on board a ship, I was unanimously elected leader of this little band. I became the William Tell of the party, as having been the first to resist the tyranny of the oldsters, and especially of the tyrant Murphy.
He began it by saying that in South Carolina any man might well be excused for falling in love with his grandmother. Then the oldsters began to depart, with laughter and gay good nights. It had been a delightful affair, one of those affairs that go with a swing and a rhythm all their own, and that one remembers with a pleasant taste in the mouth. Only the more indefatigable youngsters remained.
"Another commission," said Jerry: "a tax upon light. Billy Pitt has the best right to it." A second glass of grog was poured out, and the bribe disappeared down Mr Byfield's gullet. "Now we'll put the light out," said one of the oldsters, covering the candlestick with a hat. "If you will put your candle into my lantern," observed the obsequious master-at-arms, "I can then report the lights out.
With some of the mess-room officers I was still in disgrace, and was always disliked by the oldsters in my own mess; with the younger midshipmen and the foremast men I was a favourite. I was too proud to be a tyrant, and the same feeling prevented my submitting to tyranny.
The pipes ceased; the drums beat again, echoing from the Sgornach rock and the woody caverns of Blaranbui, Glenshira filled to the lip with rolling thunder, the sea lulled to a whisper on the shore. Gilian and the children were now all that were left to follow the soldiers, for the oldsters had cheered feebly and gone back.
All of them were flower-crowned with the luminous, lovely blooms old and young, slender, mocking-eyed girls, dwarfed youths, mothers with their babes, gnomed oldsters on they poured, silent for the most part and sullen a sullenness that held acid bitterness even as their subtle, half-sinister, half-gay malice seemed tempered into little keen-edged flames, oddly, menacingly defiant.
We never saw any more of him; but I heard that he obtained a commission in the army, and three months after he had joined his regiment was killed in a duel, resenting some fancied affront offered to the bluid of McFoy. A few days after McFoy quitted the ship, we all had leave from the first lieutenant to go to Portsdown fair, but he would only allow the oldsters to sleep on shore.
By jingo! when I was a youngster and joined my ship for the first time, I remember, I was glad enough to get a mouthful of salt junk and hard tack, without any of your bloaters and marmalade and foreign kickshaws ay, and thought myself doocid lucky, I can tell you, if I didn't get a thrashing from one of the oldsters in the mess, if I grumbled, to make me relish my grub the better.
Mr Dombey made a very gracious reply; and Major Bagstock, having patted Paul on the head, and said of Florence that her eyes would play the Devil with the youngsters before long 'and the oldsters too, Sir, if you come to that, added the Major, chuckling very much stirred up Master Bitherstone with his walking-stick, and departed with that young gentleman, at a kind of half-trot; rolling his head and coughing with great dignity, as he staggered away, with his legs very wide asunder.
The Senate of this republic, at the time when Patrick Henry Hanway was given his seat therein, was a thing of granite and ice to all newcomers. The oldsters took no more notice of the novice in their midst than if he had not been, and it was Senate tradition that a member must hold his seat a year before he could speak and three before he would be listened to.
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