In a ship there is neither bud nor fallen leaf. There is no ploughing of furrows, no scattering of seed. The winds are never sweet with the fragrance of broken earth. Fingers of sunshine touch no grass to vivid green when a shower is over and the clouds have blown away. Rain does not whisper among trees or press the dust of long, white roads into little pits of darkness; it lashes at grey steel, hangs in beads on the metal rims of scuttles, envelops topmasts in an unsteady mist. The seasons are marked by the Navigator’s instruments and by variation in the colour of the waves. On a fixed date white cap-covers are taken out, on a fixed date they are put away again; and thus does summer begin and end. When snow falls the Watch for Exercise banishes it with squeegees. Christmas Day comes when the December wine bills are nearly exhausted. Nothing flowers and goes to rest; nothing is ever born again. Spring, when the calendar bids her come, comes obediently, but to ships of war she brings few gifts. Even that essence of her which makes men ashore lift their heads and say that spring is in the air, reaches ships changed by the tang of salt, or often, in port, corrupted by the smell of harbour scum. By no visible or tangible promise of her future glory does she give to seamen credit with which they may tide over the lean, harsh months of the early year. Through January and part of February John struggled hard and honestly to settle down, to convert the inevitable into the desired. Long years ago he himself had chosen to enter the Navy, and now, though he wondered at the decision, he knew he must abide by it. His mother’s means, he felt sure, were too small to re-educate him as he would need to be re-educated if he left the Service. He must put away from him the thought of change. He must make the best of things as he found them. He must work, work and forget, work at naval subjects, and awaken somehow new ambitions, new enthusiasms, new desires, which should stand between him and the old. He would put no pen to paper save the pen of a naval officer. He would banish poetry from him as men banished a drug. Rosebery’s _Pitt_, Morley’s _Gladstone_ and _Walpole_, Lecky’s _Democracy and Liberty_, all should go back to the Chaplain’s cabin; for were not the lives and dreams of statesmen a part of that old world which was to be left behind? Keats, too, should go; and Blake, and Milton’s prose, and Burke’s speeches. One afternoon of resolution he piled them together and carried them off. Still Mr. Alter’s books remained, and these he lent, urging the borrowers to keep them as long as they wished. From his sea-chest he disinterred battered notebooks on Mechanics and Heat and Steam. From the Gunroom shelf he dragged down Sennett and Oram’s standard work on the Marine Steam Engine. This was, indeed, to be a grand burning of boats.