Sailor-men all over the world are the same, and will be throughout all time, except in so far as their life is improved by new conditions. Though Jack aboard ship is the greatest grumbler in the world, ashore he loves all the world, and likes to be taken for the sailor of the songs. In a week he will spend the earnings of many months, and go back aboard ship, sadder, perhaps, but never a wiser man. He seldom makes resolutions, however, and so, when anchor takes ground again, his money leaves him with the same merry clink as before. Though a Bohemian and a nomad, he does not silently steal away, like the Arab. His goings, like his comings, are accompanied with much carousing and song-singing; and the sweetheart he leaves gets to know that wiving is not for him. With anchor atrip and helm alee, Jack mourns not, no matter whither bound. The improved conditions on the modern men-of-war have changed things for him somewhat, and, though still impregnated with old ideas, Jack is more temperate, more fore-sighted, and more self-reliant than he once was. His lapses of discipline and his falls from grace are less frequent than of yore, for he has to keep an eye to windward if he expects to win any of the benefits that are generously held out to the hard-working, sober, and deserving. But the bitterness of the old days is barely disguised in the jollity of the chanteys. However we take it, the sea-life is a hardship the like of which no land-lubber knows. Stories of the trials of the merchant service come to him now and then and open his eyes to the real conditions of the service. Men are greater brutes at sea than ashore. The one-man power, absolute, supreme in the old days, when all license was free and monarchies trod heavily on weak necks, led men to deeds of violence and death, whenever violence and death seemed the easiest methods of enforcing discipline. Men were knocked down hatchways, struck with belaying-pins, made to toe the seam on small provocation or on no provocation at all. The old-fashioned sea-yarns of Captain Marryat ring true as far as they go, but they do not go far enough. In England the great frigates were generally both under-manned and badly victualled, and the cruises were long and sickening. The practice of medicine had not reached the dignity of the precise science it is to-day, and the surgeon’s appliances were rude and roughly manipulated. Anæsthetics were unknown, and after the battles, the slaughter in which was sometimes terrific, many a poor chap was sent to his last account by unwise amputation or bad treatment after the operation.