Before she had time to sit down again, an unexpected adherent suddenly sprang to his feet in the person of Freddy Beal, the class dunce.

'So would I!' shouted Freddy, desirous to support the distinguished Theodora, and at the same time to win a little unaccustomed prominence for himself. "They caught me just as I was shinnying over the back fence, and they had to lock me up to keep me home. I ain't "gone" on school, but it would have been fun to come that day! It was the only day I ever wanted to come to school. Charley Starr had n't ought to get no purple star. That stunt of his wa'n't brav'ry.'

The greatest and the least having been heard from, every one in the class then felt called upon to rise up and say that his soul had been sick within him because he was not permitted to come to school the first day of the blizzard. Miss Prawl was devoutly wishing that she had abolished the purple star before such zealots as the critical Theodora and her followers had darkened the door of Room H, when, as if drawn into the discussion by Fate, Mr. Wadsmore entered with a brilliant smile for the class, and a rather serious look for Miss Prawl. He handed her a note, and said mysteriously,

'From an I. P. And I'm afraid I think he's right.'

936 CLINTON AVENUE

MY DEAR MR. WADSMORE,

On close questioning, I find that my son Charles was actuated in his dare-devil adventure of leaving for school at six-thirty o'clock on the first morning of the blizzard by a desire to win a purple-chalk star. He knows that he very nearly lost his life, and he is hoping that his rash act may be rewarded in the foolish way I mentioned above. He considers that he is a hero, unappreciated at home, and he is working himself into a fever over the whole thing.

I am a plain man [Miss Prawl's eyes wandered to the coat of arms] and I greatly disapprove of such methods in education. Unless you can do away with your purple-star system immediately, I shall be obliged to transfer Charles to another private school which is nearer, and therefore more convenient.

Awaiting your reply, I am

Very truly yours,

CHARLES AUGUSTUS STARR.

Miss Prawl read the note in a flash, snatched up the eraser, rubbed out the purple star, opened the chalk box, and dropped the purple chalk in the wastebasket.

'What Theodora said about the purple star is quite true,' she said, soberly. And I shall never give any one a purple star. Never!'

As Mr. Wadsmore left the room with an approving smile at Miss Prawl, Theodora's eyes grew soft and bright, and she sighed with pathetic relief. For the first time since she had heard of the purple star, the world seemed altogether right.

I

It seems like sacrilege to attempt to undermine the popular belief in the glories of 'life on the rolling wave.' Yet all of us have heard the authenticated stories of brutal floggings at the triangle, and of keelhauling the last man down from aloft, that give the lie at once to those supposed glories. Such treatment of sailors was common enough in most of the navies in the Trafalgar period, the very time when most of the sentimental rubbish in poetry and song was composed. In those days men lived hard, fought hard, and died hard; or, as cynical old sailors have it, 'Wooden ships were manned by iron men, whereas now iron ships are manned by wooden men.' We should not criticize too complacently the brutality of that era; it was the almost inevitable accompaniment of the warlike, adventurous life, both of the men who fought under Nelson and Paul Jones, and of the merchant sailors of that period, who almost without exception were engaged in commerce such as the latter part of the nineteenth century never experienced on the ocean. And it must be said for the men of a century ago that they were not tainted with the commercialism of to-day, nor did they feel the effects of this commercialism, which for refined cruelty is unequaled by floggings at the triangle.

Commercially speaking, the early sixties of the last century were the palmy days of British and American sailing ships. Misfortune in the guise

of the Civil War overtook a goodly number of the best American ships and left the British with a crippled competitor. As everybody in America regretfully admits, American ships went to leeward in the race and her superb seamen went with them.

One would suppose that in the sixties the brutalities of an earlier generation would have been forgotten, and that commercial enterprise, pure and simple, would not admit of methods even remotely resembling those of Nelson's time. Yet it is a notorious fact that, in nearly every American ship and in numerous British ships, discipline was taught by brute force and maintained by methods more vigorous than polite. Hard-case Yankee packets were a byword in every quarter of the globe to the late nineties of the last century. In such ships, and in British ships as well, men were shackled for days to stanchions in the fore peak or lazarette, with only dry biscuits and water to sustain them, while the rats played havoc with their hair and bare feet. Protest brought only a crack on the cranium with an iron belaying-pin.

The afterguard of a sailing ship usually the captain and two mates dominated the whole crowd before the mast. Individual cases of violence with lethal weapons on the officers' part seldom met with collective resistance. When this did occur, it invariably took the form of mutiny, murder, and scuttling. The possibility of united action against even the most fiendish cruelties and victimizations never seemed to en

ter the heads of sailing-ship men; from their boyhood they had been used to witnessing, if not actually experiencing, the gentle art of persuasion as practiced by the officers; there were no unions in those days to take the matter up; moreover, in most cases, the law sided with the officers and refused to hear the sailor's side of the story, or to see the evidence of the manhandling. There were no cowards either among the officers or among the men, for no man can be both a coward and a sailing-ship man; the life will not admit of such freakish contradictions. But there was in the air just enough fear of the consequences of insubordination, of laziness, or of daring to call one's soul one's own, to cause respect for the men who paced the poop. Worked, as they were, like dogs in all weathers; practically starved, except in American vessels, where there was always good food; losing sleep as they did by night or day, watch below or watch on deck, the sailors still observed and respected the line of demarcation which the belaying-pin and sometimes a gun in the hip-pocket chalked out.

Men worked until they dropped for want of sleep. As a boy, one had this obligation toward work driven into one's weary soul even when seasick and homesick on one's first voyage to sea. The boy who left a mother's care and a comfortable home, to pig it in a halfdeck half awash in bad weather, got no pity even from his apprenticed halfdeck mates; and before the first voyage was over the hardening process had begun and his brutal instincts were set floating top-sides, displacing those finer feelings which contact with women creates. Sailing-ship youngsters never did possess heart, mind, or soul: they were just young, growing, starving animals, without a care in the world save to pack their stomachs with food, no matter how maggoty it might be.

II

Perhaps my first voyage has embittered me against all officers who use violence to boys and men, though there have been times when as an officer I yearned for the days of sail again that I might knock seamanship and discipline into the worthless trash so often found in forecastles to-day.

I well remember, when we had cast off the tug and were sailing along under topsails under the lee of the land, how buoyant I felt at being aboard a sailing ship bound around the Horn. I felt a little bigger in every way than the children I had left behind at home, and I was sorry for them. But one cannot always sail in smooth seas under the lee of the land. Very soon I found this out. All through the night I was sick and miserable; and quietly I wept a little for my mother. My watch on deck was to begin at four A.M., -it was my duty to keep time on the poop by striking the time bells, but I felt too sick to stir, so I stretched out on my seachest.

Very soon the mate, a Liverpool buck, missed me and sang out for me. I, not answering, and not caring what he did, hung on to my sea-chest until his ugly face, with murder in its eyes, appeared at the half-deck door. When he inquired why I was lying down during my watch on deck, I replied that I was seasick. This being no excuse, he ordered me on the poop at once, and as I did not respond in any way to his order, he hauled off with his heavy seabooted leg and kicked me square on the cheek-bone. This so enraged me that I snatched up a sheath knife and slashed him across the back of the neck with it. I followed him up for a second jab, but I could not reach him, for he ran aft at full speed. In my rush after him I exchanged the knife for a boataxe that for some unknown reason lay

handy on the booby hatch. Failing to catch him, I flung the thing at him as he turned to face me on the poop, and caught him full on the mouth with the flat of the axe; at the same moment I got a blow on the jaw from apparently nowhere, and went head over heels. At a providential moment the skipper had appeared, and taking in the situation at a glance had fetched me a left-hander. The mate now saw his chance and rounded on me like a tiger. But a big black retriever saved the situation, and added humor to it, by going for the seat of the mate's trousers and bringing away cloth, skin, and flesh at the first bite.

I was now used up with hunger and seasickness, and was no match for a heavy man in the prime of life. Had I been able to get at him with the axe I should have buried it in his skull, for I saw red that day; but I was helpless on the deck, kicked and bruised all over. It is a great consolation to me still to know that the mate carries today an ugly scar on his neck.

So much for the first contact with discipline experienced by a British boy scarcely out of knickers. Such treatment was practically unknown in American hard-case ships, for on them boys were respected and looked upon as a sacred trust. The law is now less tolerant of such methods of teaching discipline.

But in those days one forgot little incidents of this sort long before land was reached. As apprentice boys were looked upon as future officers, personal contact with a sea-boot was considered a means of gaining experience in teaching discipline. At their most impressionable age, these apprentices were brutalized; their finer instincts were stamped out, and they lost sympathy with the man before the mast because they felt that some day they might have to use forcible measures themselves.

Often it paid very well to treat the hands like dogs: I can well remember cases in which men were hounded out of their ships when their accumulated wages made brutal treatment profitable. I was shipmates once with a Nova Scotian hard-case mate who prided himself on having served five years in jail in Montevideo for driving five men overboard with the help of a boarhound, three of the men being drowned in their attempt to swim ashore. Nor was this an empty boast. From an unexpected quarter, quite three years afterward, I heard the same story told almost word for word.

It is easy to understand why men who underwent such treatment went in for a round of drunkenness and debauchery as soon as they landed. The reaction from discipline brought no desire to prosecute; voyages were long, the men had little opportunity to talk with people on shore, and there was never any real exchange of ideas between the seamen of the different ships in port, because they were in a muddled condition as often as not; besides, the sharks and prostitutes who lived on the sailors' money took good care that their wages went with lightning speed.

III

But such treatment and methods were bound to give way before the advance of steam, of free education,and, later, compulsory education, and the formation of unions. Steam meant shorter voyages; it also meant more contact between the seamen and shore people, who taught them the value of education and the right way to remedy their grievances. Probably, too, steam has made seamen more sober and self-respecting; we now find a large percentage of them married, while only one in a thousand married in sail. And education had its impor