How many youngsters, lured by the mysterious air of adventure pervading all things connected with the sea, have run from comfortable homes, and, after hardships innumerable, have compassed the goal of their desire--have found a shipmaster willing to take them to sea with him as boy! And then--well, happily, the young seafarer soon develops a wonderful capacity for patient endurance of evils not to be avoided, and, if of the true grit, in time looks back upon his probationary period of suffering as a training which he was glad to have endured. And the older he grows the more complacently does he recall the days when he learned to expect the blow first and the explanation afterwards, learned to eat what he could get with an appetite like an ostrich, could sleep in drenched clothing with a bare plank beneath him, and find all his consolation in the fact that soon he would be able to look down upon a newcomer with the lofty superiority of the full-blown mariner. At the risk of being thought tedious, I must repeat that for the ship boy, as for boys everywhere else in our favoured land, a brighter day has dawned. Within the memory of middle-aged men a boy on board a ship was the butt, the vicarious sacrifice to all the accumulated ill-temper of the ship. To-day tales are told of the treatment of boys in "Geordie" colliers that are enough to make the flesh creep to hear. In those days it was the privilege of every man on board to ill-treat the boy; and if, as very often happened, the poor little wretch died under it--well, what of it?--it was only a boy. And the peculiar part of it all was that the brutes who did these evil deeds prided themselves that their actions were right and proper. There was only one way of training a boy--with a rope's-end if it were handy; if not, a fist or a boot would do, but he must be beaten. One man, whom I shall always remember, as smart a seaman as ever trod a ship's deck, beat me until there was not a square inch of my small body unbruised. Scarcely a watch passed that I did not receive some token of his interest in my welfare, and on two occasions he kicked me with such violence that, with all the will in the world to obey his orders, I was perfectly helpless. My only wonder is that he did not kill me.