Such a man fulfilling this perfect attribute of command I once had the pleasure to serve under--an elderly, prosaic-looking figure, who used to come on deck shortly after daybreak every morning, with a moth-eaten Bombay-made dressing-gown flung over his pyjamas, a mangy old fez upon his head, and his bare feet thrust into sloppy slippers. Thus attired, he would pace rapidly up and down the poop for the space of half an hour, taking his constitutional--a most mirth-provoking figure. Yet no one ever laughed, either behind his back, on deck, or in the privacy of the fo'c'sle. When he spoke it was in a velvet voice, but the man spoken to invariably took an attitude of profound respect on the instant. He was old and feeble, and our crew numbered among them some rowdies; but from England to China and back again that old gentleman's commanding personality kept the ship in a quiet state of discipline which was as perfect as it was rare. On the other hand, I have seen a most stately figure of a man, with a voice like a thunder-peal, unable to obtain respect from his crew. Because in the Merchant Service, as I am never tired of reiterating, respect cannot be enforced; it must come spontaneously, a tribute to the personality of the officer to whom it is due, or it does not come at all; and then that ship is in a bad way. Another quality, which is only second in importance to the one just mentioned, is self-control. Since the shipmaster has no one above him in his little realm, it is highly important to his whole well-being, as well as to the comfort of the ship, that he should command himself. However irritated he may feel at a mistake on the part of one of his officers, he should be able to conceal it before his crew. And here the Americans have shown British officers a good example. So long as an officer remains an officer on board of American vessels, so long is he upheld by all the authority of the master. There is no sneering comment upon his movements indulged in before the crew, no tacit information conveyed to those keen-witted fellows that the hapless mate, first, second, or third, as the case may be, has lost the confidence and respect of his commander, and that consequently there is little or no danger in them treating him disrespectfully. Perhaps this is one of the hardest lessons that a shipmaster has to learn, especially in a sailing ship. For three, or perhaps four, or even five, months sole monarch of his small kingdom, anxious to make a smart passage, and often sadly hampered by adverse winds and calms, it is no easy thing for a naturally hasty man to discipline himself in such wise as to win the maximum amount of obedience and deference from those around him. Happy man if he have a hobby of some kind--a thirst for learning, a taste for natural history, anything that will exercise the powers of his mind and keep him from the moral dry-rot that always sets in where men are at