Sailors tolerate our immeasurable ignorance, for they rejoice in the sense of humour which the sea seems to enrich and expand. It is many years since a mischievous midshipman cajoled me into climbing the mast of H.M.S. "Majestic," then flying the flag of Sir Harry Rawson. Until I went up in an aeroplane at St. Omer I never drank more deeply of the cup of terror. That midshipman, for all I know, may now be one of these grave admirals with smiles lurking at the corners of their eyes and lips. It is a far cry from the naval manoeuvres of the "'nineties" to the "real thing" of 1918, but the impulse to hark back to those mimic battles is irresistible. My first and last misdemeanour was the striking of a match on the paint of a casemate. The memory of it even now makes me blush from nape to heel, and warns me that nearly everything a landlubber may say about the Navy is as the striking of a match on the wrong place at the wrong time on a Victorian man o' war. And yet those far-off days in wardroom and gunroom, on navigating bridge and quarter-deck, helped me to drink the pure milk of the Navy word. No man who has watched a blinded battle fleet keeping station on a pitch-black night, or whose head has grown giddy in the mazes of a cruiser action, or who has seen a destroyer attack pushed home in the dark, or who has seen the drifters coming in coated with ice, can fail to feel in his bones the thrill of sea-power. To such a man there comes at all moments the salt warning, "Put not your trust only in armies. For England there is but one supreme war-faith, the creed of the sea." There is no lack of lip-service to the sea-creed in these islands. The sea-litany and the sea-liturgy and the sea-prayers and the sea-collects and the sea-psalms and the sea-proverbs are tirelessly chanted and sung and said by high and low. Line upon line, precept upon precept, sea-bible and sea-gospel and sea-hymn--we know them all by heart. Our Newbolts, our Kiplings, our Conrads, our Hurds, our Leylands--yes, and our Mahans--they are all a great cloud of witnesses to the supreme necessity of sea-power. And yet in one's lay bones one feels that our practice falls far short of our preaching, and that we as a race are not utterly single-minded in our worship of the one power who has never betrayed us, the sea. The sea is a jealous god, and in these latter days a sure instinct leads one back to the old faith taught by Nelson and his forerunners, by the great captains and admirals whose bones are dust.