Yet, strangely enough, even the elementary skill required for cooking the staple food served out in the great majority of sailing ships to-day is generally wanting. Surely it is only reasonable to expect a man who engages to serve as cook of a ship to be able to boil salt beef and pork, make pea-soup, and bread, and boil rice. Nothing more is required of him at sea than this, for the better food carried for the cabin is prepared by the steward, who will generally give an eye to it also during preparation. But it is seldom that you will find a sailing-ship cook who will, or who can, do these things properly. And as to taking a little trouble to make this coarse food palatable by varying its treatment, such cooks would be astounded, indignant, at the revolutionary idea. Then, when in port the fare is changed to that of fresh meat and vegetables, the only thing that the cook seems capable of doing is to make one kind of soup. That is usually good, but soon becomes monotonous. As to roasting meat or cooking potatoes nicely, such a thought is not to be entertained; or, if the cook does try to do such a thing, the meat is usually so hard as to be uneatable by any one but a sailor or a savage. Now, I am aware that these statements of mine will be met with indignant denials in some quarters. I shall be told that things have altered so much for the better since my day (sixteen years ago) that I should hardly recognize them. Unfortunately for the makers of such remarks, I have taken pains to find out whether this is really the case, ready and eager to rejoice in the fact, if it were a fact. And I have found to my sorrow that among sailing ships the improvement is practically _nil_. When I was going to sea there were good-living ships, where plenty of preserved meats were carried, and the crews treated periodically to fresh messes; ships where abundance of potatoes and turnips and onions were put on board, and served out liberally to the crew forward as well as the officers; where a regular allowance of butter and pickles was made, and in cold weather oatmeal porridge was served out for breakfast. And there were lines of sailing ships where a scale of provisions such as these was drawn up on generous lines, and incorporated in the ship's articles instead of the shameful Board of Trade scale. There are such ships to-day, but their proportion is no greater than it was then. And if any will speak of official inspection of provisions, in order to ensure a high standard of quality, I would respectfully call their attention to the innumerable statements made and uncontradicted this present winter of the abominable condition of the food supplied on board many of the transports to our troops on their way to South Africa. Not that I believe such food would find its way into the kids of the crews of those transports in the ordinary course of things. No; but such food as that is in the ordinary course