There are usually, in every school and college, a certain number of students who, either from perversity or from having been unduly pampered at home, make a point of finding fault with the food, however good; they imagine it is "swagger" to know how these things ought to be done. A young commissioned officer who was a member _pro tem._ of a very excellent, not to say sumptuous, mess was once known to insert in the complaint book a bitter wail because _only three sorts of cheese_ were handed round at mess. This is the kind of hardship which should not be silently endured! Nevertheless, messmen or stewards do undoubtedly go wrong at times, if not kept very sharply under supervision, and inferior stuff is sometimes supplied without being discovered for a time by the heads. Well, we have reached the end of the 'nineties; but there is a small slice of the twentieth century to be dealt with before concluding this chapter. The augmentation in age, by which cadets might enter after January, 1898, as old as 15-1/2, was certain to result, sooner or later, in some very big boys being entered; and the following remarks in the _Britannia Magazine_ for Christmas, 1901, appear to indicate that a contingent had arrived, in September, of cadets who were considerably more prominent for length than breadth. "Our latest brand of naval cadets is assuming a weird shape: we are assured by the doctors and the Physical Development Society that our recent plague has produced a hitherto unknown specimen of the naval officer in embryo. It scarcely seems credible; but having the authorities to back us up with statistics, we feel safe in our statement--that the various forms of torture have revealed the fact that, although there has been an enormous increase in height, chest girth and weight have been sadly on the decrease." The "recent plague" referred to is possibly a severe epidemic of influenza which visited the ship in the spring of 1901, and caused a good deal of talk at the time; it died hard, and there were some deaths from complications, pneumonia and so on. [Illustration: H.M.S. "ISIS," SEA-GOING TRAINING SHIP. _Photo: Smale & Son, Dartmouth._] There appears to have been a sort of jealousy or inimical feeling about the _Britannia_ which is always cropping up, and finding vent in letters to the _Times_--the indignant Briton's great resource--and which does not seem easy to account for. In the bullying affair, before alluded to, the captain was busy detecting culprits and putting it down before anyone wrote to the Press, and yet the busy newspaper correspondents persisted in saddling him, and the whole system, with the blame of it. And similarly, in the case of the epidemic in 1901, everybody and everything was held accountable except the well-known capricious nature of the ailment, which crops up unexpectedly in a household or a community, and as suddenly disappears; no one knows how it got there, and its very name implies a mystery.