And Captain Meredith, walking the upper bridge and seeing a good deal more than either Mr. Spokesly or Mr. Bates imagined, wondered how it would all end. Indeed, Captain Meredith did a good deal of wondering in those days. He saw the wages going steadily up and up, and discipline and efficiency going, quite as steadily, down and down. Here was this young sprig Chippenham, his acting second officer, a boy of nineteen with no license and no experience, pertly demanding more money. Captain Meredith recalled his own austere apprenticeship in sail, his still more austere gruelling as junior officer in tramps, the mean accommodation, the chill penury, the struggle to keep employed, and he smiled grimly. He had his own private views of the glory of war; but apart from this, he wondered greatly what the final upshot of it all would be for the Merchant Service in general and Mr. Spokesly in particular. For he could not help regarding his chief officer as a brother of the craft. He himself had received no illumination from the exponents of modern thought. He had never been impressed by the advertisements of the London School of Mnemonics, for example. He was so old-fashioned as to imagine that to get on, a man must work hard, study hard, live hard, and stand by for the chance to come. Mr. Spokesly, he knew quite well, had been through the same mill as himself, only some ten years or so later. He regarded him, therefore, as he could never regard Mr. Chippenham, for example, who had never been in sail and who didn't know an oxter-plate from an orlop-beam. As far as the natural shyness and taciturnity of Englishmen would allow him, he was anxious for Mr. Spokesly to do well. The man was singularly fortunate, in his opinion, to be chief mate so soon. In nine or ten years, perhaps, he would have the experience to warrant the owners' giving him a command. Provided, of course, that he stuck to his business and took an interest in the fortunes of the firm. It will be seen from this that Captain Meredith was a hopeless conservative and reactionary. One of his brother-captains whom he met at dinner ashore one evening actually told him so. "Why," said this gentleman as he held a match to Captain Meredith's cigar, "why, my chief officer told me to my face the other day that there was nothing in experience nowadays. One man was as good as another, he said, so long as he had his master's ticket. Yes! A fact!" Captain Meredith was aware, too, that his ideas concerning conscientious achievement and enthusiasm for one's employers were equally archaic. The young men of to-day seemed to regard their jobs with dislike and their employers with suspicion. Their sole obsession seemed to be money. He had had pointed out to him an intoxicated youth who was causing a disturbance in a hotel bar, a youth going out East to a ship as third officer at two hundred dollars a month, they said. And the tale was received by every junior officer in