For a healthy lad life on the _Britannia_ must have been an ideal existence. Of course there were hardships, doubtless greater ones forty years ago than there are now. Hardships find out the weak spots in humanity--mental as well as physical. Hardships make men. Discipline is strict in the Navy, stricter than in the sister Service, but it is of a different kind. Sailors see life from a quite different standpoint from that from which soldiers look at it. In the old days there was a great deal of brutality in the Navy, but with it, at the same time, a great comradeship--a deep understanding of human nature. To-day brutality has practically disappeared, but the deep understanding of human nature remains, and with it brotherly love. A sailor's ship becomes his home, and happy as was young Jellicoe in his father's house in Southampton, his heart was soon centred in the _Britannia_ and the ever-varying round of work and play which used to keep the cadets busy from morning to night. Captain W. Graham was in command of the _Britannia_ during the greater part of the period Jellicoe served his apprenticeship to the sea--from 1874 to 1877. Turning-out at sunrise and turning-in soon after sunset; parade, swim, drill, preparation; classes, ranging from Latin to Algebra, from gunnery to rope-splicing--this is a rough idea of a day on the training ship in the early 'eighties. An old musty boat may not have been the healthiest place for a growing boy from a fond mother's and a modern physician's point of view, but the breeze which swept up the silvery Dart from the English Channel and whistled through her rigging and portholes was stimulating and life-giving. The _Britannia_ still lies at her old moorings, between the little village of Dittisham and Dartmouth town, with Kingswear, the terminus of the Great Western Railway, on the left. The Dart is one of the most beautiful and romantic of English rivers. It rises only about a score of miles away from Dartmouth, right on the moorland, in a wilderness of gorse and heather. It rushes through the granite-strewn valleys, past the glorious wooded banks of Holne Chase, roaring and tumbling until it reaches Totnes. Here its wild course is stopped with startling abruptness; from a foaming shallow trout stream it is turned into a stately river--broad, deep and calm. But the waters still carry the colour of the peat and the scent of the heather; the hills still rise from the mossy banks carpeted with daffodils and primroses in spring. And right down to the sea itself, thatch-roofed cottages, stately houses and ruined castles peer through the foliage. Dartmouth is noted for three things--its cockles and plums from Dittisham, its orchards and its annual Regatta, which in Jellicoe's day was famous throughout the world.