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a forehanded chap, thought it all a pity to have to use
our bran-new hose for that kind of work. You all know how hose gets
lying chafing around with people stepping on it, carts and wagons
running over it, coal-dust grinding into it, and so on. A pity, our boson
thought, to subject our nice new hose to that kind of abuse, when in the
condemned heap on the dock there was a length of hose that would do
the work, and he put it up to Mr. Renner, the officer of the deck at the
time.
"Now Mr. Renner was a new-made ensign, and we all of us here been
long enough in the service to know how it is about a middy that's just
got his commission. We all know how it is with ourselves when we
first get our C.P.O.--except you, Reggie, and you'll get yours some day.
Am I right? Sure I am. If there's one thing on earth we're going to do

then, it's to live up to regulations.
"No, we'll never again remember so much about rules and regulations
as we do then. No catching us in anything irregular; no sir. And so with
Mr. Renner, the new-made ensign. He brings out the blue-book and
shows the boson. 'Look,' he says. 'Paragraph fourteen thousand four
hundred and forty-two,' or whatever it was. 'Hose,' he goes on to read,
'is expendible property, to be surveyed and wiped off the
property-books by condemning to the scrap-heap and sold in the open
market to the highest bidder. There,' says our new-made ensign to our
boson, 'what it says. And according to that, the admiral himself couldn't
take that hose from that scrap-heap without authority. No, not if it was
no more than an old shoe-lace, he couldn't.'
"'But that won't fill our water-tanks, and I'd like to use that hose, sir,'
says the boson.
"'M-m!' says Mr. Renner. 'M-m! now if Mr. Shinn was aboard--' Mr.
Shinn was our executive. 'But Mr. Shinn is ashore. However, I'll tell
you what; I will speak to the captain about it,' and he steps inside the
bulkhead and writes a message to the skipper.
[Illustration: He brings out the blue-book and shows the boson]
"Now our skipper was a good old soul, and thought a lot of his boson,
and wanted to do everything he could to help him out, but also, like a
good many other good old captains in the service, he'd forgotten a lot of
this stuff about regulations. Ordinarily--say, if 'twas anything to be
done out to sea--he'd have said, 'Why, of course, Kiley; go ahead and
do it,' But this was in a navy yard, ashore, and when he gets a note with
something about regulations in it, he begins to haul to.
"And many a good sea-going old skipper is bluffed the same way about
anything that spells regulations, you betcher. So now our good old
skipper begins to tumble his hair and pull his moustache and look again
at Mr. Renner's note. At last he tells the messenger to say to Mr.
Renner that he will look into it and let him know.
"Another hour of studying, and the captain calls in his new yeoman
that--"
"Was that you, Dallie?"
"Never mind--and cut out the personal questions, Reggie son. And
remember you don't rate any more questions than anybody else here.
I'm telling you the story, and I'll tell all that's good for you and just the

way it happened.
"Now if this yeoman had been better acquainted with his skipper, he'd
have been of some use just then. He might have suggested, in a way
any of us can at times without interfering, or jarring an officer, even as
topsided as a captain, how the thing could be fixed up without any
correspondence game. But this new yeoman hadn't yet learned what his
captain's steaming radius was. And the captain, having regulations on
his brain and not getting the hint at the psychological time, he dictates a
regulation communication to the commandant of the yard, which the
new yeoman frames up just as he was told. It was a letter inquiring of
the commandant the status of the condemned hose in question, and
could it not be loaned for temporary use, to be returned in due
season--say, next day? and so forth.
"Now the commandant was a good old soul, too, and nothing would
have pleased him better than to accommodate his old friend and
classmate, the captain of the _Savannah_; but seeing this thing come to
him in such formal style, and himself being just off a three-years' cruise,
and always a little doubtful about these port regulations, anyway, and
wanting to do things up in a seaman-like way, he turns to