needed, that peevish saying attributed to Dr. Johnson,
        that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
            The criminal paid the penalty of his crime. The promptitude of the
        punishment has proved salutary. Nothing amiss is now apprehended aboard
        H.M.S. Indomitable.«
 

                                      XXVI

Everything is for a season remarkable in navies. Any tangible object associated
with some striking incident of the service, is converted into a monument. The
spar from which the foretopman was suspended, was for some few years kept trace
of by the blue-jackets. Then knowledge followed it from ship to dockyard and
again from dockyard to ship, still pursuing it even when at last reduced to a
mere dockyard boom. To them a chip of it was as a piece of the Cross. Ignorant
though they were of the real facts of the happening, and not thinking but that
the penalty was unavoidably inflicted from the naval point of view, for all that
they instinctively felt that Billy was a sort of man as incapable of mutiny as
of wilful murder. They recalled the fresh young image of the Handsome Sailor,
that face never deformed by a sneer or subtler vile freak of the heart within!
This impression of him was doubtless deepened by the fact that he was gone, and
in a measure mysteriously gone. On the gun-decks of the Indomitable the general
estimate of his nature and its unconscious simplicity eventually found rude
utterance from another foretopman, one of his own watch, gifted as some sailors
are, with an artless poetic temperament. The tarry hands made some lines, which,
after circulating among the shipboard crew for a while, finally got rudely
printed at Portsmouth as a ballad. The title given to it was the sailor's.
 

                              Billy in the Darbies

Good of the Chaplain to enter Lone Bay
And down on his marrow-bones here and pray
For the likes just o' me, Billy Budd. - But look:
Through the port comes the moon-shine astray!
It tips the guard's cutlass and silvers this nook;
But 'twill die in the dawning of Billy's last day,
A jewel-block they'll make of me to-morrow,
Pendant pearl from the yard-arm-end
Like the ear-drop I gave to Bristol-Molly -
Oh, 'tis me, not the sentence, they'll suspend.
Ay, ay, all is up; and I must up too
Early in the morning, aloft from alow.
On an empty stomach, now, never it would do.
They'll give me a nibble - bit o'