The trumpets and drums cease as the “Principall Master” steps forward and takes up his position beside the standing cup. He raises the gleaming cup on high so that all around may see. Then, amid universal silence, he proclaims, in a clear resonant voice that every one may hear: “By commandment of Her Grace, whom God preserve, I name this ship the _Dreadnought_! God save the Queen!” As the Lord High Admiral’s representative utters the last word, he drinks from the cup, and a moment after ceremoniously pours out a portion of the wine upon the deck. The next moment, with a wide sweep of the arm, he heaves the standing cup, with a little wine left in it, into the river—a sacrifice, as it were, on behalf of the bride newly-wedded to the sea, or that the Queen’s cup might never be put to base uses—perhaps, indeed, as a sort of propitiatory act. So it was done, says Master Phineas Pett, “according to the ancient custom and ceremony performed at such times.” Again there is a blare of trumpets and a ruffle from the drums, with cheers afloat and ashore for Her Grace, and hearty congratulations to Master Matthew Baker on the occasion. After that the _Dreadnought_ is formally inspected between decks and below, and the crew’s health is drunk by the high officers in ship’s beer—sure to be of a good brew on a launching day. By the time that all is over the ship has been warped back alongside the shore again, and the company adjourn thereupon to wind up the day’s proceedings with a good old English dinner, given to the Master Shipwright and the officials of the yard at the Lord High Admiral’s expense. Such is a passing glimpse of the memorable scene—as far as one may venture to reconstruct it—on “Dreadnought Day” at Deptford Royal Dockyard, that Tuesday afternoon, in Tudor times, three hundred and thirty-three years ago. It is hard to fancy such doings, at Deptford of all places, now. Oxen and sheep for the London meat market nowadays stand penned in lairs on the site of the filled-in dock whence the _Dreadnought_ was floated out—the same dock whence the Armada _Victory_ had preceded her, whence Grenville’s _Revenge_ followed her. Master Shipwright Baker’s lodging is nowadays a cattle drovers’ drinking bar. The old-time navy buildings—their origin even now easily recognisable, at any rate externally—serve as slaughterhouses, and so forth, among which rough butcher lads, reeking of the shambles, jostle daily to and fro. On every side is bustle and clatter and hustling, the rumbling of Smithfield meat vans over the old-time cobble stones, the jargon of Yankee bullock-men, the bleating of sheep under sentence of death. Strange and hard is the fate that in these material times of ours has overtaken what was once the premier Royal Dockyard of England, this former temple, so to speak, of the guardian deity of our sea-girt realm: