Then in the construction yards one catches glimpses of battleships coming into being; and in the dry docks--the first of which owes its existence to the initiative of Henry VIII in 1495, and was in constant use for many years--one finds all sorts and conditions of ships undergoing repairs. In “Anchor Lane” one has another object-lesson in what is practically a street composed of anchors ready for any demand or contingency. Many things have changed; but the anchor and the block, though the size and pattern of the former have from time to time been modified, remain, we are told, practically the same as a century or more ago. The navy blocks--which are made of elm after “pickling” in salt-water mud for at least two years--are made in precisely the same way as when a century ago the elder Brunel invented and introduced special machinery for their manufacture. The Gun Wharf never fails to interest the visitor, be he a sailorman or civilian. Here stacks, or “parks,” of guns of various sizes, but mostly big, are to be seen, forming, as a visitor once not inaptly remarked, “an object-lesson concerning the wastefulness of progress,” for comparatively few of the hundreds of weapons there gathered together for the scrap-heap have been discarded because of any flaw or other fault, but merely because they have become outclassed or out-of-date. In connexion with the Gun Wharf are the buildings containing the vast supplies of arms, from which at a moment’s notice 40,000 or 50,000 men could be equipped. A large volume would be required to deal adequately with all the many interesting features of the dockyard and its life; but as one watches the men at work, the seamen getting stores aboard, or fitting out, one cannot but feel that in their tireless and swift activity there is still that spirit animating the men of all grades which from Armada times have served to make them the best seamen afloat. Each century, from the closing years of the sixteenth, has brought its wonderful record of work done within the dockyard walls, just as each age has done what was at the time required of it swiftly and well. In the eighteenth century the vast number of sixty-six huge line-of-battle and other war ships were launched from the slips, amongst them the _St George_, _Prince of Wales_, _Princess Royal_, and famous _Ramillies_, all of ninety-eight guns, with the leviathan _Britannia_ of one hundred; and in the succeeding century this output was more than doubled. From Portsmouth Dockyard, too, went afloat the first paddle boat, the _Hermes_, and out of it from Henry VIII’s reign onwards have gone galleons, line-of-battle ships, ironclads innumerable, flying “the meteor flag of England,” to earn immortality and the crown of glory which attaches to brave deeds done and daring acts accomplished.