and were built so fragile, so as to weigh as little as possible, and so go faster. It is very silly indeed to build vessels of War so strong as to last a hundred years. They are obsolete in less than ten years. But the Navy is just one mass of Tories! In the old days a Sailing Line of Battleship never became obsolete; the winds of Heaven remained as in the days of Noah. I staggered one Old Admiral by telling him that it blew twice as hard now as when he was at sea; he couldn’t go head-to-wind in his day with sails only, now with the wind forty miles against you you can go forty miles dead against it, and therefore the wind is equal to eighty miles an hour. He didn’t quite take it in. I heard one First Sea Lord say to the Second Sea Lord, when scandalised at seeing in a new ship a bathroom for the midshipmen, that he never washed when he went to sea and he didn’t see why the midshipmen should now! But what most upset him was that the seat of the water-closet was mahogany French-polished, instead of good old oak holystoned every morning and so always nice and damp to sit on. (Another improvement is unmentionable!) I must not leave this chapter without expressing my unbounded delight in having to do business with so splendid a man as Major A. G. Hadcock, the Head of the Ordnance Department at the Elswick Works, who fought out single-handed all the difficulties connected with the inception of the eighteen-inch and the twenty-inch guns of the “Furious” and “Incomparable.” I have another friend of the same calibre, who has consistently been in the forefront of the Battle for the adoption of the biggest possible gun that could be constructed--Admiral Sir Sydney Eardley-Wilmot; he was also the most efficient Chief of the Munitions Department of the Admiralty. When I was gasping with Hadcock over a 20-inch gun, Wilmot had a 22-inch gun! I really felt small (quite unusual with me!). Now I hope no one is going to quote this line when they review this book:--“Some men grow great, others only swell.” CHAPTER XIV SOME PREDICTIONS When I was “sore let and hindered” in the days of my youth as a young Lieutenant, a cordial hand was always held out to me by Commodore Goodenough. He was killed by the South Sea Islanders with a poisoned arrow. Being on intimate terms with him, I sent him, in 1868, a reasoned statement proving conclusively that masts and sails were damned as the motive power of warships. (As a parenthesis I here insert the fact that so late as 1896 a distinguished Admiral, on full pay and in active employment, put forward a solemn declaration that unless sixteen sailing vessels were built for the instruction of the Officers and men of the Navy the fighting efficiency of the Fleet would go to the devil.)