"With all my heart," replied Turner. "It was a sad affair, and was
all owing to the pride of an officer, who was not much of a sailor,
at all events."

I drew nearer, that I might not lose a word of what Turner said; and
then he narrated, in the following words,

THE LOSS OF THE "ROYAL GEORGE"

"Well, messmates, the 'Royal George' was a hundred-gun ship; and what we
don't often see now, when I first belonged to her her guns were all
brass. We had brass twenty-four-pounders on our quarter-deck,
forecastle, poop, and main deck, brass thirty-twos on our middle deck,
and brass forty-two-pounders on our lower deck. In the spring of '82,
when we were at Plymouth (about six months before she sunk), it was
considered that the brass forty-twos on the lower deck were too heavy
for her, so they were put on shore, and we had iron thirty-twos instead.
I don't think, myself, it made much difference in the weight of metal,
and we were sorry to part with them. We were a flagship, you know--old
Kempenfelt carrying his blue at the mizzen--and our poop lanterns were
so large that the men used to get inside them to clean them. She was
rather a top-heavy sort of ship, in my opinion, her upper works were so
high--why, we measured sixty-six feet from the keelson up to the
taffrail; but still, with proper attention, there was nothing to fear on
that score.

"Well, it was on the twenty-ninth of August, '82--that's just fourteen
years and about six weeks ago--that we were lying at Spithead, in
company with Lord Howe's fleet of between twenty and thirty sail of the
line: there was the 'Victory,' 'Barfleur,' 'Ocean,' and 'Union,' all