Quarterdeck and Fok'sle: Stories of the Sea

The friendship between Young Brydell and Grubb the marine came about in this way. One morning in May, just after Admiral Beaumont had finished the beautiful toilet he made at precisely eight o'clock every morning, he threw wide his bedroom shutters to see if the toilet of the navy yard grounds had been made too. The admiral was the tenderest-hearted old fellow in the world, but the strictest sort of martial law prevailed in the matter of tidiness in every part of the navy yard over which he exercised or could claim jurisdiction. As for the small boys at the yard, they harrowed the admiral's kind soul to that degree that he gloomily declared he would have the flag half-masted and make the band play a dirge before the very next house in which a boy baby was born. Nevertheless, he had been known more than once to have begged small boys off from the avenging birch switch. To this general antagonism to small boys one exception was made—Young Brydell. He was called Young Brydell because, young as his father, the ensign, was, the boy was actually twenty years younger—being nine, and a beautiful, terrible, lovable imp. Perhaps it was because Young Brydell had no mother that the admiral and everybody else, except Aunt Emeline, winked at the mischief in which he reveled. When Young Brydell drew his first breath his mother had drawn her last—and so from the beginning a tender atmosphere of love and pity seemed to surround him.