"Didn't they do anything to help him ?" "Why, they took him down to the cock-pit, as they called the midshipmen's berth on the lower deck, where we're going now," replied the Captain, leading the way down the companion and an interminable series of other ladders afterwards, as if they were descending to the kelson, the space getting all the narrower and darker as they went down.
"They took him below--to die!" Here, in a small, confined apartment, which Bob's father said looked "like the condemned cell at Newgate," and whose sole apparent advantage, as the Captain explained, was in its being below the water-line, and therefore the only safe place in a ship before the days of torpedoes and submarine warfare, he went on to tell the children, the hero breathed his last; his dying moments eased by the knowledge that he had done his duty to his country and cheered by the news that the foe was vanquished, Hardy making him smile by saying how many ships of the line had struck their colours already or been destroyed.

Nell shivered.
"Let us go upstairs," she said, in a very depressed tone, in keeping with the melancholy associations of the place.

"Let us go upstairs!" The Captain laughed out at this.
"You'd make a sailor faint, if he heard you ever use that expression!" he cried.

"The idea of speaking about `upstairs' on board a ship, and your uncle a sailor, too, missy!" "What should I say ?" she asked, looking into his face as well as the dim light would permit.

"What should I say instead ?" "Why, `on deck,' of course," he replied.