It is true that there are now hospitals or sick-asylums in connection with some of the sailors' homes at our seaports, and to the general hospitals any sailor can be admitted if he should be able to procure a letter from a governor. The 'tween-decks of the Dreadnought no longer form the sole hospital for invalided merchant seamen in the Port of London; but even reckoning all that has been done for sailors, and fresh from a visit to that great building where three hundred hale and hearty seamen of the great mercantile navy find a home, we are left to wonder that so little has been accomplished for those old tars who, having lived for threescore years or more, going to and fro upon the great deep, can find no certain anchorage, except within the walls of some union where they may at last succeed in claiming a settlement. Surely there is no figure which occupies a more prominent place in English history than that of the sailor—not the man-o'-war's man only—but the merchant seaman, the descendant of those followers of the great old navigators who were called "merchant adventurers," and who practically founded for Great Britain new empires beyond the sea. In the poetry, the songs, the literature, the political records, the social chronicles, the domestic {76} narratives of England, the sailor holds a place, and even at our holiday seasons, when our children cluster on the shingly shore or the far-stretching brown sands of the coast, we find still that we belong to a nation of which the sailor long stood as the chosen representative. Nay, in the midst of the life of a great city we cannot fail to be reminded of the daring and the enterprise which has helped to make London what it is.