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The manner of its breaking, publicly and protected by politics, has bred disrespect for all law in the boys who are growing up. And they are the ones who will run our State when we oldsters are gone. I'll not say anything about the other reforms that conditions are calling for. There's one the big one that flaunts itself in our faces. I'm of the old school, Mr. Thornton.
I continued a member of the midshipmen's mess, but was not allowed to enter the berth: my meals were sent to me, and I took them solus on my chest. The youngsters spoke to me, but only by stealth, being afraid of the oldsters, who had sent me to the most rigid Coventry. My situation in the fore-top was nearly nominal.
Although it was not Saturday evening, when our weekly sing-song was usually celebrated, youngsters and oldsters alike united with a common impulse to have a general hullabaloo, their efforts resulting in such a row as never had been heard, I believe, on board the old Candahar before, and, I am equally positive, has not been equalled since, even after she became a harbour ship and was reduced to her present condition of "Receiving Hulk."
We oldsters, be we ever so old, become boys again as we look at that familiar old tomb, and think how the seats are altered since we were here, and how the doctor not the present doctor, the doctor of our time used to sit yonder, and his awful eye used to frighten us shuddering boys, on whom it lighted; and how the boy next us would kick our shins during service time, and how the monitor would cane us afterwards because our shins were kicked.
Poor Signor Mezzi had never, I believe, been at sea before; and though we tried to make him comfortable, and Dicky Sharpe generally resisted the temptation to play him tricks for he was certain to be cobbed by the oldsters if he did, I fear that his life was far from a pleasant one.
Punch's pictures, at the Illustrated News pictures, at all the pictures in the book-shop windows at this Christmas season, as oldsters, we feel a certain pang of envy against the youngsters they are too well off. Why hadn't WE picture-books? Why were we flogged so? A plague on the lictors and their rods in the time of Plancus!
A few days after M'Foy 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. We anticipated so much pleasure from our excursion, that some of us were up early enough to go away in the boat sent for fresh beef. This was very foolish.
"Paula, or any woman as remarkable as Paula, would attract him a thousand times more than all the sweet, young, lovely things like you in the world. We oldsters have our standards, you know." "And I'll have to put up with the youngsters," Ernestine sighed. "In the meantime, yes," he chuckled.
The old man did not leave them long in this shy discomfort, but said, smiling with an old man's mirth: "Dick, my lad, and you, my dear Clara, I rather think that we two oldsters are in your way; for I think you will have plenty to say to each other.
The action elicited a contemptuous laugh from one or two of the new hands, but the oldsters began shifting sundry articles which depended from their belts into positions from which they might be handled at the shortest notice; and the black cat, more wise than any of them, having drunk his fill, stalked solemnly out into the security of the darkness.
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