'Hot work, sir,' his captain said.

'Showery,' replied the admiral, as his cocked-hat was knocked off by the wind of a cannon-ball.

He lost both legs before the war was over, and said merrily, 'Stumps for life'' while they were carrying him below to the cockpit.

In my girlhood the boys were always bringing home anecdotes of old Admiral Showery: not all of them true ones, perhaps, but they fitted him.

He was a rough seaman, fond, as they say, of his glass and his girl, and utterly despising his brother Geoffrey for the airs he gave himself, and crawling on his knees to a female Parleyvoo; and when Geoffrey died, the admiral drank to his rest in the grave: 'There's to my brother Jeff,' he said, and flinging away the dregs of his glass: 'There 's to the Frog!' and flinging away the glass to shivers: 'There's to the Turncoat!' He salted his language in a manner I cannot repeat; no epithet ever stood by itself.