Here I must leave the fireman and trimmer. I hope that engineers and their crews will forgive me, being a sailor, for having had the hardihood to say anything about them at all. They know very well the prejudice that even now exists against them in the minds of most sailors, and they will probably look closely into what I have written for some sign of sneering depreciation. But they will not find it. My sympathies are most fully with them. My admiration for them is great. And I think that as regards the firemen and trimmers, that their work in tropical seas is so utterly unfit for white men to do that, in spite of the hardship attendant upon loss of employment at first, it would be a good thing if stokeholds were entirely manned by negroes, who, from their constitutional experience of heat, must be far better fitted to endure the conditions of the stokehold. Many southern-going ships carry them now. I should not be sorry to see them the rule, and my countrymen doing something better. CHAPTER XXXV. CONCLUSION. And now, approaching the conclusion of the whole matter, the end of what I feel to have been an important task, while the way in which it has been performed is an open question, I ask myself, "What is likely to be the effect of this book upon the minds of those for whom it has been written? Will they think that the British Mercantile Marine is a profession which they should exert all their influence to keep their young friends and relatives out of, or will they feel, as I do, that, in spite of all its obvious drawbacks, it should be by no means neglected as an opening for enterprising adventurous youngsters, the right stuff of which British sailors are made?"