probably knows how to heave the lead and the log, how to sing out when he sees a green or a red light ahead, how to wash down and secure the ropes which fasten a vessel to a wharf. But for further duties my gaze explores the steamer in vain; I look aloft at the pole-mast, which any boy in a bowline may grease down. Some mysterious machinery forward supplies the place of the windlass. The anchor comes up to the music of the engine, and the grand old full-throated hurricane chorus-the "Fare ye well, my pretty young girl," "Old Stormy, he is dead and gone, Across the plains of Mexico"-are as hushed as the dead rat in the Geordie's mainchains.

Therefore, in writing about the life of the Merchant Sailor at sea, I luff and shake it out of her to let the steamer go by quickly, as there is no business.

On the Lookout in Thick Weather.

to be done in her forecastle-nothing that a young fellow who is thinking of going to sea would care for me to talk about.

Many fleets of sailing ships are still afloat, and the old sailor goes to his grave happy in the reflection that not in his time anyhow has the smoke of the funnel blackened the delicate gleam of the distant sail off the horizon. Indeed sailing tonnage is on the increase in Great Britain, however it may be with the Protection-waistcoated yards of the United States. It is of interest, then, to lads contemplating the sea as a career to know that the vocation, in its essentials, is as it was almost in the beginning. They may get from records of old voyages, and the works of such writers as Fenimore Cooper, Dana, and Melville, as clear an idea of what is going on now as though they should make a voyage round the world in something brand-new out of Boston or the Thames.

In

The reason why it is imagined that the essentials of the ocean vocation are wholly changed is because the landsman obstinately persists in confounding the navies of the State with the ships of the Mercantile Marine. the Navy the transformation is undoubtedly absolute. The three-decker, the frigate, the corvette, the ten-gun "pelter," the smart little schooner with her pennon like a beam of light and her "long-tom" keeping a thirsty forecastle lookout with a grinning iron eye for the slaver and the pirate; these and the like are hopelessly vanished types. Hence it is that Marryat, to all intents and purposes, is as antiquated as Smollett, and Smollett as any ancient mariner who seems to lean out of the blackletter frame of old Hakluyt, leering at you with a jelly-like eye under the sharp of a hand as wrinkled and lean and long as his who shot the albatross in Coleridge's poem. The landsman looks at an iron-clad and then he reads "Peter Simple," and he understands that there has happened a mighty change, unparalleled in the history of mutation. A merchant sailor on the other hand reads "Two Years Before the Mast," or Cooper's

Riding Down a Stay.

jibs and stay-sail yearning to the flyingjibboom-end, make no difference; the life is as it was; as, while it remains under canvas, it will ever be; and it is well that young fellows who mean to go to sea should know this to begin with, because there are shelves full of human experiences extant to tell them what to expect.

I suppose no life has such a fascination for boys as the sea, certainly for the British boy. I have sometimes, while wondering how a lad's thoughts run when a passion for the sea is making a pirate of him to the marrow, looked into my own memory. I went to sea when I was thirteen and a few months. I followed the calling for nearly eight years, and claim knowledge of it on every merit of service and suffering. It was not Marryat and the other novelists that sent me to sea. It was simply and wholly the love of a ship. I was "brought up" at the seaside and was never weary of looking at the vessels loading and discharging at the wharves. They were dirty old col

liers chiefly; worn, lean, and ragged fabrics out of Newcastle and the North, but to my boyish sight they were as lovely as the most poetic in grace and beauty of the Symondite keels. I loved the old caboose with its grimy, smoking chimney, the greasy one-eyed rogue of a cook, looking up at me with a shark's languishing leer; the inverted boat amidships; the weather worn skylight aft sealing from my sight the romantic mysteries of the cabin, out of whose gloom, through the companion-way, there would sometimes stagger, with drunken stateliness, the figure of a skipper, with legs like the prongs of a pitchfork.

All sorts of marvellous romancing thoughts visited me out. of those crazy old barks and brigs; dreams of a distant golden land, vague but sweet as a child's fancy of heaven; visions of the lonely Pacific islands, with the oily gleam of a black man's body in the shadow of a cocoanut-tree, and a canoe riding easily upon the boiling wash of the ocean comber. Of how many things of this sort did I dream! I guess when I was a little boy I was much like others, who are little boys now, and who want to go to sea in this year as I did in that. Well, let me here put down what I think of it all, from stem to stern, from truck to keel, plumbing the foremast from the seaman's chest at the foot of it, to the royalmast head, where Blue Peter is flying.

Nothing is more familiar than a ship, and nobody has been written, talked of, sung about more abundantly than the sailor; and of ships and sailors the landsman knows absolutely nothing at all.

How and where is Jack housed? What does he eat and drink? What are his pleasures? What his grievances, hopes, prospects? To answer these questions you must go to sea as a sailor; you must sit round the messkid with the crew, you must drink, with a face of loathing, if you will, of the contents of the scuttle-butt; you must be imperfectly clothed; your

vast flowing curly wig, know about weevils and bilge water, when he charged the throat of that caricature, Ben, with long-shore jargon about the delights of the deep? Neither ever went Dibdin to sea as a sailor-though everything must be forgiven to the composer of "Tom Bowline," especially when you consider that Great Britain was savagely at war in Dibdin's time; that the press-gangs were bloodily busy with truncheon and cutlass; seamen hard to get, seeing how the very best of them-from Tweed to Thames, were to be found under the Stars and Stripes; and that Dibdin was hired by the State to court the hayseed to the tenders with melodious assurances that life on board ship was made up of fiddling, drinking, dancing, the humors of Saturday night, hats full of prize money, and a home ashore at the public expense, until death, for the timber-toed heart of oak.

The sea is a hard life-none harder; and if you make up your mind to go to sea before the mast, you must expect coarse fare, rough usage, cheerless toil. There are three grades of aforemast folks boys who are in everybody's way and have everything to learn; ordinary seamen who are able seamen in the making; and able seamen who are supposed to be thorough sailors, "every hair a ropeyarn and every finger a fish-hook." An able seaman is expected to know (expectation is often disappointed!) how to steer, how to heave the lead and the log, how to furl and set a sail, how to bend and unbend canvas, how to send down yards and masts, how to set up rigging. If he is a true sailor and a lover of his calling he will possess as exact acquaintance with the fabric of a ship as a clockmaker with the mechanism of a timepiece. Nor need a young fellow long follow the sea to know all that any old boatswain could teach him. A fullrigged ship is a complicated object to the eye. It is in reality as simple to understand as a chimney-stack. Only consider the sort of intellects which have proved supreme as master-riggers! A young fellow need never doubt that he will pick up all about a ship as swiftly as his brains will per

an

mit him to look and to think if he will but dedicate himself wholly to the calling. I can claim for myself that when I first went to sea, before we were abreast of Agulhas, outward bound to Sydney, New South Wales, there were few questions left for me to ask, little remaining for me to learn.

I am speaking of practical seamanship. The art of the sextant and chronometer is another matter. But more is wanted in a seaman than the artfullest acquaintance with the mechanism of his ship. He needs a spirit that is in perfect sympathy with the whole bounding fabric. It is this spirit which in its perfection makes the exquisite helmsman, who feels the life of the vessel in a single spoke of her wheel as the uttermost link of the spider's delicate principality of silk trembles its sensibility to the insect's fore-claw resting on a single thread. So with heaving the lead or the log; with innumerable details of daily routine, the "swigging off" on a rope, the pillowing of the midship slack of a sail into the grace of a frigate-like bunt, the jockeying of a yardarm for reefing or sending down canvas; in such things will show that sympathetic spirit which, in a seaman, must inform and make the soul of his mechanic knowledge, or he is no true sailor.

When once the ship is out of soundings and the anchors stowed, the discipline of the sea-life is as monotonously recurrent as the pulse of the ocean swell. Decks are washed down at daybreak; the hands go to breakfast at half-past seven; throughout the forenoon watch there are fifty jobs for the mate and the boatswain to put the men to. I should need every page of this magazine to catalogue the needs of a sailing ship even in these days of machinery and wire rope, when much of the old serving, parcelling, tarring, setting up, and the like is at an end. There are sails to be mended. The men are kept at work aloft, on the forecastle, in the waist. There is always something to be done; a sailor is never allowed to be idle. And though it's a midnight black as the tomb, all snugged down perhaps to a band of topsail, a breathless calm, Jack must still keep