“I commend the boy,” said my uncle.

“I also commend him:  but the crowd of his fellow-midshipmen found it against the custom of the service and gave him the strap for it.  This, however, raised him up a champion in one of the taller lads, who protested that their conduct was tyrannous:  ‘and,’ said he, very generously, ’to-morrow night I too propose to say my prayers.  If any one object, he may fight me.”  Thus, being a handy lad with his fists, he established the right of religious liberty on board.  By-and-by one or two of the better disposed midshipmen followed his example:  by degrees the custom spread along the lower deck, where the dispute had happened in full view of the whole ship’s company, seamen and marines; and by the time she reached her port of Halifax she hadn’t a man on board (outside the ward-room) but said his prayers regularly.”

“A notable Christian triumph,” was the Vicar’s comment.

“Quite so.  At Halifax,” pursued my father, “Captain Byng took aboard out of hospital another small midshipman, who on his first night no sooner climbed into his hammock than the entire mess bundled him out of it.  ‘We would have you to know, young man,’ said they, ’that private devotion is the rule on board our ship.  It’s down on your knees this minute or you get the strap.’

“I leave you,” my father concluded, “to draw the moral.  For my part the tale teaches me that in any struggle for freedom the real danger begins with the moment of victory.”

Said my uncle Gervase after a pause, “Then these Corsicans of yours, brother, stand as yet in no real danger, since the Genoese are yet harrying their island with fire and sword.”

“In no danger at all as regards their liberty,” answered my father, poising his knife for a first cut into the saddle of mutton, “though in some danger, I fear me, as regards their queen.  They have, however, taken the first and most important step by getting the news carried to me.  The next is to raise an army; and the next after that, to suit the plan of invasion to our forces.  Indeed,” wound up my father with another flourish of his carving-knife, “I am in considerable doubt where to make a start.”

“I hold,” said my uncle, eyeing the saddle of mutton, “that you save the gravy by beginning close alongside the chine.”

“I was thinking for my part that either Porto or Sagone would serve us best,” said my father, meditatively.

Dinner over, the four of us strolled out abreast into the cool evening and down through the deer-park to the small Ionic temple, where Billy Priske had laid out fruit, wine, and glasses; and there, with no more ceremony than standing to drink my health, the three initiated me into the brotherhood of St. Swithun.  It gave me a sudden sense of being grown a man, and this sense my father very promptly proceeded to strengthen.

“I had hoped,” said he, putting down his glass and seating himself, “to delay Prosper’s novitiate.  I had designed, indeed, that after staying his full time at Oxford he should make the Grand Tour with me and prepare himself for his destiny by a leisured study of cities and men.  But this morning’s news has forced me to reshape my plans.  Listen—­