A number of factors go to make his speech the obscure jargon it has been represented. Recruited from the North, South, East, and West, he brings with him the dialect he spoke in childhood. And it were easier to change the colour of a man’s eyes than to take out of his mouth the brogue he lisped in his cradle. A succession of commissions abroad enriches his vocabulary with a smattering of half the tongues of Earth—Arabic, Chinese, Malay, Hindustanee, and Japanese: smatterings truly, and rightly untranslatable, but Pentecostal in their variety. Lastly, and proclaiming his vocation most surely of all, are the undying sea phrases and terms without which no sailor can express himself. Even the objects of everyday life need translation. The floor becomes a deck, stairs a hatchway, the window a scuttle or gun-port. There are others, smacking of masts and yards, and the "Tar-and-Spunyarn" of a bygone Navy; they are obsolete to-day, yet current speech among men who at heart remain unchanged, in spite of Higher Education and the introduction of marmalade and pickles into their scale of rations. The tendency to emphasis that all vigorous forms of life demand, finds outlet in the meaningless oaths that mar the sailor’s speech. Lack of culture denies him a wider choice of adjectives: the absence of privacy or refinements in his mode of life, and a great familiarity from earliest youth, would seem an explanation of, if not an excuse for, a habit which remains irradicable in spite of well-meaning efforts to counteract it. The conditions of Naval Service sever his home ties very soon in life. The isolation from feminine and gentler influences that it demands is responsible for the curiously intimate friendships and loyalty that exist on the mess-deck of a man-of-war. With a friend the blue-jacket is willing to share all his worldly possessions—even to the contents of the mysterious little bag that holds his cleaning-rags, brick, and emery paper. Since the work of polishing a piece of brass make no great demand on his mental activity, the sailor chooses this time to "spin a yarn," and, from the fact that the recipient of these low-voiced quaintly-worded confidences usually shares his cleaning-rags, the tar describes his friend as his "Raggie." To the uninitiated the word signifies little, but to the sailor it represents all in his hard life that "suffereth long and is kind." His love for animals, which is proverbial, affords but another outlet for the springs of affection that exist in all hearts, and, in his case, being barred wider scope, are intensified.