The six junks will be told off as tenders as follows:—
Junk No. 1, { Lieutenant Mervyn L. Trevelyan. { Midshipman James Rawlings.
Junk No. 2, { Midshipman Richard Ford { Naval Cadet Richard F. Morton.
Junk No. 3, { Lieutenant Ronald G. Forbes. { Midshipman the Hon. Talbot Withers.
Junk No. 4, { Midshipman Harry G. Webster. { Naval Cadet W. D. St. G. Ponsonby
Junk No. 5, { Lieutenant Benjamin Langham. { Midshipman Percy Jones.
Junk No. 6, { Midshipman Steven J. Johnston. { Naval Cadet John E. Smith.
Two petty officers and nine seaman ratings and one signal rating will be detailed to each tender, also one native pilot.
The tenders will act under the orders of the Commanding Officer of the gunboat to which they are attached, and will be prepared to leave Tinghai after the gunboats have completed with coal and provisions.
We had nothing to do now but wait for the _Ringdove_, so Mr. Trevelyan took his junk and our junk the _Sally_ away sailing every day, till we really got quite good at managing the clumsy gear and the huge matting sails. We did some more gun practice as well.
The _Goldfinch_ and _Sparrow_ took their junks away before our gunboat arrived, and we gave them a jolly good send-off. At last our turn came, and the _Ringdove_ finished coaling, and we were given orders to be ready to start at daybreak.
The evening before we had to start there hadn’t been a breath of wind, and Dicky and I sat up whistling for it till very late. This was the first time we had spent the night aboard, and we really couldn’t sleep because of the excitement and the fleas. The wind did come by the morning, but from the wrong direction, and the _Ringdove_, to save time, simply towed us away behind her.
It wasn’t a very glorious start, but they gave us a grand cheer, and the Captain had shouted, "Good luck, Dick! pull your pound for the good old West Country," and that made me gloriously happy, because he had never called me "Dick" since the first day I joined.
When we had got round the corner, out of sight of the _Vigilant_, and knew that we were in for any amount of adventures, we felt simply ripping, and the sun came out too, and we sat on deck and dried our things.
We were so close to the _Ferret_ that we could talk to Jim, and presently he came out of his "kennel"—he called his a "kennel", and we called ours a "rabbit hutch"—and yelled across to us to look. He had a huge cake in both hands. "You’ve got one too, I expect," he shouted, and we crawled into our hutch; and in a corner, under the sea boots, was just such another, all covered with icing, and "Chin Chin Joss from Ah Man" scrawled on it in sugar. Wasn’t that jolly decent of the old messman? Of course we’d spent no end of money getting sardines and jam and biscuit from him—those sovereigns the Captain had given Jim and myself had come in jolly useful—but we never expected anything like this, and it just made us completely happy, and we had a piece each on the spot, and waved across to Jim whilst he and Mr. Trevelyan had slices too.