CHARLES DARWIN. 91 



experience to him, that he cannot help, in his need of 

 support and sympathy, communicating it to his friend 

 Henslow. " The officers," he writes to him, " are like the 

 freshest freshmen that is, in their manners, in every- 

 thing else widely different." Very widely different, at 

 first impracticable, indeed, must have appeared these 

 free-spoken young men of the world to the unaccustomed 

 student, ill at ease in himself. The ready new speech of 

 that familiar new intercourse the chaff must have 

 seemed at first an unintelligible argot to him, and rude, 

 disagreeably rude, painfully rude, uncomfortably rude. 

 The first lieutenant, Wickman, gives voice to how the 

 " fly-catcher " appears to them. " If I were skipper," he 

 never for a moment hesitates to assure the young man, 



" I would soon have you and all your d d mess out 



of the place your d d beastly devilment ! " How 



the two sides must have stared at each other ! Mr. 

 Francis Osbaldistone in Rob Roy overheard Dickon the 

 horse-jockey whisper to Wilfred the fool "Look thou, 

 an our French cousin be nat off a' first burst." To 

 which Wilfred answered, " Like enow, for he has a queer 

 outlandish binding on's castor." The midshipmites may, 

 on such a rule, have wickedly enjoyed the first sea-sick- 

 ness of the fly-catcher; but he dined in the captain's 

 cabin, and they were obliged to call him " Sir " a 

 formality, however, that soon yielded to love, as the 

 wickedness of glee to sympathetic respect. There was 

 no " bumptiousness " in the landsman. On the contrary, 

 there was always the ready smile, the concessive blush, 

 the willing word. He was always at his duty as well. 

 No matter how sick they saw he was, to that duty he 

 enduringly stood. He knew all about shooting also, and 

 he could himself shoot there was, for them, good service 

 to him in that all through. He was " a rare plucked 

 one," too ; he shot a condor ; he stole up behind a fox 



