[Page 25]
He did not come on deck the next day, that of the prodigious, the very
moving great-gun exercise; nor did he appear for the small-arms
exercise in which he had trained some of the Marines. From time to
time he turned into the wardroom to pick up a newspaper when almost nobody was there. His
appearance never altered from its perpetually mottled sweating
complexion, yet he frequently changed his uniform, blaming his servant for any slip.
Some days of quite untypical S[outh] African weather
slowed the squadron and and it
possiblewas [may] well have
been during the conversation