"Now the commandant was a good old soul, too, and nothing would have
pleased him better than to accommodate his old friend and classmate, the
captain of the _Savannah_; but seeing this thing come to him in such
formal style, and himself being just off a three-years' cruise, and
always a little doubtful about these port regulations, anyway, and
wanting to do things up in a seaman-like way, he turns to his chief
clerk and says, 'What do we do about this?'

"Now what the commandant meant and what he would have said, if he'd put
it in more words, was: 'I want the _Savannah_ to have the use of that
condemned hose, but I suppose there are certain formalities to be
observed, and your business is to know what these formalities are. Here,
you attend to these formalities, but see that the _Savannah_ gets the
use of the hose.' That's about how he would have put it aboard ship, but
he hadn't quite savvied this shore-going chief clerk at his elbow.
Toward him he didn't have that same sea-going feeling that he'd have
toward one of his old ship's crew.

"And the chief clerk wasn't the kind that lost sleep trying to make
trouble for anybody; but he was the combination of being twenty-five
years on one job and having a manager of a wife--an upstanding,
marine-sergeant sort of a woman, with the beam and bows of a battleship,
and an eye--oh, an eye!--and the chief clerk and his missus, they'd just
finished paying for their house over in the city, and they'd had to
scrimp and scrape for the Lord knows how many years to get it paid for,
and there was a marriageable daughter to provide for, and his wife never
let him forget that he mustn't risk their real estate or jeopardize his
job or the marrying prospects of the daughter, who was just getting to
where she was making a lot of desirable acquaintances. There was a young