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Words: 54133 in 23 pages
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PAGE "I was just trying to scare Grubb" 14 "Brydell, with Atkins, a very Smart Sailor, was at the Wheel" 95 "Brydell got the thumbed Bible and read to him" 117 "'Look out, you Young Rebel,' called out the Sergeant" 197 "The Yankees they have come and stolen Prescott from his Bed" 232
A QUARTERDECK STORY.
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. For the admiral was possessed by a demon of neatness and order that is apt to develop in a naval officer long used to the perfect cleanliness and discipline of a man-of-war.
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.
The admiral was a bachelor of long standing and had a wholesome awe of babies and their mammas, although he ordered the babies' papas about without any awe of them whatever. In vain he tried to negotiate with the officers' wives, offering as a basis that the babies be permitted a promenade around the main walks between two and four every day, the walks to be immediately rolled afterward. The officers' wives simply laughed at him, and the babies continued to kick up the gravel, and the admiral retired completely discomfited.
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.
However, the escapade in which young Brydell figured that May morning had so many elements of atrocity that the admiral at first determined to punish him just as he would any other malefactor. Grubb was the admiral's orderly, and on this particular morning he had just knocked at the bedroom door with the letter bag, when he heard something between a roar and a shriek that caused him to dash the door open expecting to find the admiral rolling on the carpet in an epileptic fit.
"Orderly!" shouted the admiral, turning as red as a turkey cock with rage, "direct the pick and shovel squad at once to level that construction, and bring that young gentleman here to me," pointing out the window to Young Brydell. Grubb then saw what was up.
In the middle of the great lawn, just in front of the admiral's house, was a dirt fort, constructed with no inconsiderable skill. The turf for about twenty feet square had been ruthlessly torn up to make the glacis, and over it floated a small American flag about as big as a pocket handkerchief.
On top of the glacis stood Young Brydell with a miniature rifle pointed straight at the admiral's window. Around him lay the bodies of:--
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