When we say "that slacker's not pulling his weight" we use a term that has come down from the old Rowing Age, when a man who was not helping the boat along more with his oar than he was keeping her back with his weight really was the worst kind of "slacker." But most of the sea terms we use in our land talk come from the Sailing Age of Drake and Nelson. To be "A1" is to be like the best class of merchant ships that are rated A1 for insurance. "First-rate," on the other hand, comes from the Navy, and means ships of the largest size and strongest build, like the super-dreadnoughts of to-day. If you make a mess of things people say you are "on the wrong tack," may "get taken aback," and find yourself "on your beam ends" or, worse still, "on the rocks." So you had better remember that "if you won't be ruled by the rudder you are sure to be ruled by the rock." If you do not "know the ropes" you will not "keep on an even keel" when it's "blowing great guns." If you take to drink you will soon "have three sheets in the wind," because you will not have the sense to "steer a straight course," but, getting "half seas over," perhaps "go by the board" or be "thrown overboard" by friends who might have "brought you up with a round turn" before it was too late. Remember three other bits of handy man's advice: "you'd better not sail so close to the wind" (do not go so near to doing something wrong), "don't speak to the man at the wheel" (because the ship may get off her course while you are bothering him), and, when a storm is brewing, mind you "shorten sail" and "take in a reef," instead of being such a fool as to "carry on till all is blue." When you are in for a fight then "clear the decks for action," by putting aside everything that might get in your way. The list could be made very much longer if we took the whole subject "by and large" and "trimmed our sails to every breeze" when we were "all aboard." But here we must "stow it," "make everything ship-shape," trust to the "sheet-anchor," and, leaving the age of mast and sail, go "full steam ahead" into our own. "Full steam ahead" might well have been the motto of Nelson's flag-captain, Hardy, when he was First Sea Lord of the Admiralty; because, twenty years before the first steam armoured ship was launched, he wrote this opinion: "Science will alter the whole Navy. Depend on it, steam and gunnery are in their infancy." There were just a hundred years between Trafalgar and laying the keel of the first modern _Dreadnought_ in 1905. But Hardy foresaw the sort of change that was bound to come; and so helped on toward Jellicoe and Jutland. That is one reason why foreigners cannot catch the British Navy napping.