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“I promised my father not to sell my clothes,” I answered, with dignity. “Where’s my bedroom, I say?”

“Why, there,” said he, pointing with a tar-stained stump of forefinger into the dusk. “Shut your eyes and walk straight, and your nose’ll steer ye the right course, I lay.”

I spied a door to the right some little distance abaft the part of the deck that was pierced by the great mainmast, and making for it, entered, and found myself in a long narrow cabin fitted on either hand with a double row of bunks, or sleeping-shelves, and lighted by three little round portholes, called “scuttles.” Bright as the day was outside, in this cabin it was no better than twilight, and I hung for some moments in the doorway, scarcely able to distinguish objects.

When presently I could fairly use my sight I took notice of a thin slip of a table, penetrated by stanchions, up or down which it could be made to travel as space happened to be wanted. At the aftermost extremity athwart this interior were two or three shelves containing tin dishes, pannikins, coarse black-handled knives and forks, jars of pickles, red tins of preserved potatoes, and other such commodities: the produce, as I afterwards heard, of the amount which each midshipman had to subscribe in a sum of ten guineas to what was called “the mess”—and a mess it was!