ing ship will find work for every minute of the hour. Sail must be trimmed, shortened, enlarged, reefed, expanded afresh over and over again. In one respect the sailor of to-day is better off than the mariner of an earlier time; he has the double topsail yard-a notable American invention which, consistently with Bullish traditions, the English shipowner was very slow to adopt. You let go your upper topsail halliards and are at once under close-reefed canvas with the upper cloths almost becalmed by the lower till they can be

stowed.

In my time it sometimes took all hands a ship's company of thirty

"two blocks " of them. I have seen the topsail with the yard on the cap blowing up bladder-shaped, hard as cast iron, with men on the cloths dancing and stamping to bring the reef-band down to the grip of the fellows on the yard, with a seaman at the weather earing shrieking to the captain on the poop to luff and shake it out of her, the captain meanwhile with a sullen nod, "holding on all," fearing not only the weight of a green sea aboard, but the loss of half the men off the yard should he put the helm down by a spoke or two. As with the studdingsail so with the single topsail; the age of reefing in the full old sense of that

word is over; and let those who contemplate the ocean as a career be thankful that it is so.

I wish I could draw a picture of Jack's pleasures while on the high seas. I would do so if I knew where to look for them. My experience is that there is no section of the working classes less cared for by their employers than seamen. Do you ever hear, for example, of a shipowner putting a little library of books, not necessarily religious, into a forecastle or deckhouse for the use of the crew? In olden times few sailors could read; in these days there is scarce a Jack who cannot spell through a newspaper or a volume; many can flourish the pen and write fairly good English; but the sailor is still accepted as the traditional dog of the centuries, and if his chest lacks the things he may sing out in vain for a sheet of paper and a drop of ink; there is nothing for him aft, and he may hunt the forepeak to no purpose for the means of sending a message home to his mother or wife or sweetheart.

Fielding, in the account he wrote of his voyage to Lisbon, wonders that the gentlemen of the jacket should prove the cursing, blaspheming, growling fellows the great novelist seems to have found them. Did he hope to witness the polish of the footman in the forecastle hand of his day? You will not surely look for refinement in men whom you flog and feed on food which maddens with constipation; whose work is man - killing, whose wage is soul-subduing; who, themselves sprung from the humblest, you embrutalize yet by neglect, by leaving them in their leisure to the indulgence of their own wild and often inhuman passions. Yet in this manner was the sailor of Fielding's and of a much later day treated. In this age we do not flog, but to what degree is the sailor better off than was the tarpaulin of Fielding's time? Jack goes to sea in a bigger ship than the old salt sailed in, but is his life the securer for that? Is his deckhouse drier than the black old forecastle, when the freight of

iron or coal sinks the hull to the washstreak and when a shift of cargo will give a list which there is no virtue in the axe, in this day of metal shrouds and back-stays, to remedy?

That the average British merchant sailor was ever in any century the ruffian Fielding would have us believe, I doubt; that he is no ruffian in this age, but on the contrary a worthy overtaxed poor fellow with twenty grievances he is unable to submit or obtain redress for we all know. And I wish I could say that the growth and maintenance of what is honest and virtuous in Jack was due to the recognition of him as a man with human needs and feelings by those who employ him. Every young fellow with a taste for the sea has read or heard much of the quality of the food that is served out to sailors. This matter of provisions is one of the bitterest troubles of the seaman. I understood the significance of it years ago; it was, as it is, a perpetual menace; it involved a ceaseless threat of peril, mutiny, bloodshed on the high seas; and with the hope of making the subject clear to the landsman I wrote "The Wreck of the

In the Forecastle.

Grosvenor." In Great Britain at the time I am dictating this article, the pressing marine question and problem of the hour is this same subject of the quality of the provisions served out to merchant sailors. People are begin

ning to agree that the sailor has been poisoned or starved long enough, and that it is about time humanity or science gave him wholesome food to help him through about the hardest toil a man undergoes in this world.

Steele, in the "Tatler" (No. 39), tells us that when Charles II.'s fleet was to be victualled they brought two samples of ships' bread to the king, who, not knowing which to choose, threw them to a dog, and the piece the beast snatched was the biscuit the sailors got. This may account for the old saying that sailors' food is fit only for a dog; but in sad truth much of the provisions that are shipped for seamen's use the hungriest dog would keck at. Nothing but a man could live upon it. Nobody but a sailor could chew it. I hope to live to see this great wrong put right. For years I have dealt with it in articles and novels, and done my best to accentuate it to the attention of a people for whom maritime affairs seem to have no interest, though they are the greatest naval power in the world and first of all nations as owners and build

ers.

I am asked to write the truth about the merchant sailor, and I must frankly tell my young readers whose leaning may be toward the sea that, as things stand, they must look to be ill-fed if they enter a merchantman's forecastle. I believe the American seaman, when he is to be found, is better used in this way than the British; his scale of dietary is not larger than ours, but the food is of better quality. His flour is white; his biscuit does not wriggle at the pores; his pork and beef are sweet. There would be little to complain of if sounds meant things; if the names in a catalogue of forecastle provisions expressed the true nature of the stuff they labelled or indicated. For example, in 1844, the Committee of the General Shipowners' Society recommended a scale of forecastle eating that comprised bread, beef, pork, flour, rice, pease, tea, sugar, mustard, and vinegar. Here seems plenty for a poor man's meal. A yokel, bent on going to sea, might never have heard of half of these delicacies in his father's ill-thatched cottage; and I believe no sailor would

complain if the pound and a quarter of beef, the pound and a quarter of pork, the half pound of flour, and the like served out day after day, were as these same things are in butchers' shops and grocery stores ashore.

But open the average harness cask in which the meat is kept, and the odor is that of the trough; hand up a piece of biscuit out of the bread-barge and let it lie in the sun-the baker's biscuit ashore does not crawl like that! Ob serve the dingy hue of this sample of flour. Where grew the wheat, and where revolved the mill by which that cask was filled? Doubtless in some of the steam mail-lines, the crews are wellfed; that is, the provisions served out to them are of excellent quality. This is notably the case in the forecastles of some of the Atlantic liners and in the vessels belonging to the Union Steamship Company, where the dietary scale besides beef, pork, and so forth as above, includes fresh bread, butter or marmalade, suet, molasses, pickles, fresh potatoes, raisins, and other articles calculated to keep Jack content. But the owner of the sailing ship will say: "The Union craft are steamers; the passage to the Cape of Good Hope is made within three weeks; they can very well manage to give fresh potatoes and fresh meat also; my ships are sometimes three and sometimes four months between port and port without touching." But my answer is, the time occupied in a voyage is no excuse for shipping bad forecastle provisions to start with. If you carry passengers in your saloon or cuddy, your cook and steward contrive to manufacture a wholesome bill of fare for them, meal after meal, though your ship be a hundred days at sea. It is not dogs, but men, who have "signed on with you forward for your round voy age. You have no right to expect willingness in servants you starve. may point to your tierces and your hogsheads, but the spirit of famine will lurk in a crammed harness cask if the meat in it stinks.

You

This food-question is not understood ashore because the ship-owners hold up their dietary scales and the public read the list and think there is plenty, and that Jack should be satisfied. I