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'Where's my servant?' he suddenly roared. 'Grimes! Grimes!'

'Sir?'

Grimes put his head round the chart-room door.

'I'm going to dress, and I'll want my breakfast. I'll have coffee.'

'Coffee, sir?'

'Yes.' Hornblower bit off the 'damn you' he nearly added. To swear at a man who could not swear back and whose only offence lay in being unoffending was not to his taste, just as some men could not shoot foxes. 'You don't know anything about coffee?'

'No, sir.'

'Get the oak box and bring it in to me.'

Hornblower explained about coffee to Grimes while working up a lather with a quarter of a pint of freshwater.

'Count out twenty of those beans. Put them in an open jar--get that from the cook. Then you toast 'em over the galley fire. And be careful with 'em. Keep shaking 'em. They've got to be brown, not black. Toasted, not burnt. Understand?'

'Well, yes, sir.'

'Then you take 'em to the surgeon, with my compliments.'

'The surgeon? Yes, sir.' Grimes, seeing Hornblower's brows come together like thunderclouds, had the sense to suppress in the nick of time his astonishment at the entry of the surgeon's name into this conversation.