To-day one obtains too little historic colour in the streets of the old town. The "Blue Posts," where the midshipmen stayed and joked and quarrelled, was burned down in 1870, and the "Fountain" is now a Home for Sailors, conducted upon strictly non-alcoholic lines, and Broad Street, which was at one time so very, very lively a place, has declined from the riotous days of yore into a more or less sedate old age. The inns with which it abounded are still there, but how altered their custom, their use and wont, from the hard-drinking, hard-swearing, hard-fighting days of old! One may look back upon those old days with regret for a vanished picturesqueness and yet not wish them back; may know that the sailor who drinks cocoa and banks his wages in the Post-office Savings Bank is better off and immeasurably happier than his ancestor who, if he survived to receive any pay at all, squandered it instantly upon all conceivable kinds of drink and debauchery, and yet can see that his was by far the most interesting figure. It is the same with the ships of the navy. No one will contend that life was healthier upon the old wooden line-of-battle ships than it is on the modern ironclads of the fleet; not a single voice could be raised in favour of the dim and dirty orlop-decks of the old men-o'-war, in comparison with the light, airy, and roomy quarters on board our battle-ships of to-day; and yet there is scarce an Englishman who does not heartily regret the old three-deckers that rode the waves so gallantly, whose tier over tier of guns rose high above the waves and made a braver show than ever the "iron pots" of modern times can do. [Sidenote: _OLD AND NEW_] The old-time aspect of Portsmouth is gone for ever. An almost complete transformation has taken place in appearance, in thought, and manner in little over a century, and where the body of Jack the Painter hung, high as Haman, from a lofty gallows on Blockhouse Beach, no criminals swing to-day. Even the "cat," that instrument of discipline, too barbarous to be honoured even by immemorial usage, no longer flays the backs of A.B.'s, and is relegated to the cold shades of a museum, to rest beside such long-out-of-date instruments of torture as the branks and the thumb-screws.