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