Really I am half afraid to say what I have seen done by cooks on board British ships, it seems so incredible to landsmen. But the subject is so important in its bearing upon the well-being of the men, that one hardly likes to leave it without telling all the truth. I have seen a cook who did not know how to open a tin of meat, who tried to chop it in half with an axe; who was too lazy and filthy to wash the saucepans out, but _wiped_ them out instead; another, who made duff without yeast, and boiled it in salt water without a bag--a lump of dough that was like a piece of grey india-rubber when it was served up; another, who did not use a frying-pan for steaks in harbour, but flung the chunks of meat upon the top of the red-hot stove, and unblushingly sent the charred flesh into the fo'c'sle for the men to eat. But the strangest thing of all, a thing that puzzles me to this day, was the action of a crew in one vessel where we were cursed with the queerest specimen of an incapable for cook. We shipped a man in Rangoon as A.B. who was really a good cook as ship-cooks go; and as soon as he found out how things were, he volunteered to teach that wretched food-spoiler his duties in his (the seaman's) own time. Then, wonderful to relate, the very men who were suffering from the vile messes the pseudo-cook was making, turned round upon that volunteer, saying that if _they_ were the cook they wouldn't allow no ---- interloper to meddle with their work, so they wouldn't. Of course this discouraged the reformer, and he desisted from his laudable efforts, with the result that we were in a state of semi-starvation all the way home. Truly a sailor is a strange being. There is a lower depth still, impossible as it may seem--in small vessels where the galley dwindles to a "caboose," a sort of sooty cupboard on deck, too small for the miserable youth who is both cook and steward to get into. So he stands on deck, often swathed in oilskins, his head in the grimy hole, with the smoke from the stove nearly stifling him, doing his "cooking." Does this state of things need any comment? Fancy cooking under such conditions, if you can. In bad weather, of course, the fire cannot be kept alight, so that the crew must go without any other comfort for their craving stomachs than biscuit and cold water. A short meditation upon such conditions of living should bring to many of us a sense of shame for our complainings at food which, were it ten times as bad, would be an unheard-of luxury to the sailors on board some of our ships.