Explore "An Awfully Big Adventure" by Bartimeus on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
My relief turned up three days later, and that night they gave me a farewell dinner in the Wardroom. It was like all shows of the kind -- a mixture of wild joviality and moments of sentiment, real or stimulated by the cup. I had to make a speech, of course, and altogether was not sorry when it was at last possible to escape to the Quarter Deck. I had given no reason for my abrupt departure from the ship, and I was conscious that I had succeeded in surrounding myself with a sort of glamour of mystery. Bunje (he was our First Lieutenant then) would have it that I was about to contract a matrimonial alliance with an exiled princess, and made a moving speech after dinner that was not in all its features fit for reproduction in these pages.
The Young Doctor stoutly maintained that I had decided to embrace Holy Orders, and insisted on borrowing the Padre's cassock to wear while he outlined my probable career as a missionary in the valley of the Yangtse-Kiang.