In the first place, the routine of a cook's duties in a sailing ship is fairly fixed; there is not much room for variation. We will suppose that it is Monday morning in the middle of a long passage. At 4 a.m., when the middle watch is relieved, the cook is called. Going at once to his galley, he lights his fire with a handful of tarry yarns and a little wood, and pops the kettle on. Then a grating noise and a pleasant smell are manifest; he is grinding coffee. While the water is boiling he will attend to the mixing of the sponge set overnight for bread or duff, whichever it is his custom to make out of the half-pound of flour which every man is entitled to on that day of the week. At two bells (five o'clock) he puts his head out of the galley door and cries "Coffee." On the word every man of the watch on deck, except the steersman, brings his pannikin to the galley door and receives a little more than half a pint of--well, we'll call it coffee; but really, when you come to think of it, the name is somewhat misapplied. For the daily allowance is half an ounce of green beans, which, by the time they are roasted and ground, are hardly capable of yielding sufficient caffeine to make a pint and a half of drinkable infusion, or rather decoction, since the cook must boil it to get any flavour at all. But that is a detail. At any rate, the liquid is hot, and it may be sweet, if the drinker is economical with his twelve ounces of sugar, careful enough to make it last him the week. This morning coffee is a great institution. However unsavoury it may be as a beverage, it is looked forward to as no other meal of the day is, for it breaks up the long and sleepy morning watch, it ushers in the day, and its medicinal effects are undoubted. After it has been drunk, the man at the wheel relieved for his share, and a smoke indulged in, the cry of "Wash decks" is heard, and the day's work begins. The cook's duties are light. He has nothing to prepare for the men's breakfast--that is, in eight ships out of ten--except another jorum of questionable coffee, about a pint for each man. In most ships breakfast for the men is the grimmest farce imaginable. A few fragments of dry ship-biscuit, and a pint of coffee, cannot by any stretch of courtesy be called a meal. A little butter would go far to make it one. A few potatoes wherewith to make dry hash or lobscouse with a few remaining fragments of meat left from the two preceding meals, and an onion to flavour it with, would cause the ship to be gratefully regarded as a "good-living" packet. In American ships this is the rule; few indeed of them are to be found where a good breakfast is not provided for the men, and, what is quite as important, the quality of the bread (biscuit) supplied is usually superior to that found in the cabins of British sailing ships. Not so in Canadian vessels. It is a profound mystery to me, the way in which Canadian sailors, or, for the matter