en a
storm is brewing, mind you "shorten sail" and "take in a reef," instead
of being such a fool as to "carry on till all is blue." When you are
in for a fight then "clear the decks for action," by putting aside
everything that might get in your way. The list could be made very
much longer if we took the whole subject "by and large" and "trimmed
our sails to every breeze" when we were "all aboard." But here we must
"stow it," "make everything ship-shape," trust to the "sheet-anchor,"
and, leaving the age of mast and sail, go "full steam ahead" into our
own.

"Full steam ahead" might well have been the motto of Nelson's
flag-captain, Hardy, when he was First Sea Lord of the Admiralty;
because, twenty years before the first steam armoured ship was
launched, he wrote this opinion: "Science will alter the whole Navy.
Depend on it, steam and gunnery are in their infancy." There were just
a hundred years between Trafalgar and laying the keel of the first
modern _Dreadnought_ in 1905. But Hardy foresaw the sort of change
that was bound to come; and so helped on toward Jellicoe and Jutland.
That is one reason why foreigners cannot catch the British Navy napping.

Another is because the British "handy man" can "turn his hand to
anything"; though even his worst enemies can never accuse him of being
"jack of all trades and master of none." He is the master of the sea.
But he knows the ropes of many other things as well; and none of the
strange things he is called upon to do ever seem to find him wanting.
When a British joint expedition attacked St. Helena the Dutch never
dreamt of guarding the huge sheer cliffs behind the town. But up went
a handy man with a long cord by which he pulled up a rope, which, in
its turn, was used to haul up a ladder that the soldiers climbed at
night. Next morning the astounded Dutchmen found themselves attacked
by land as well as by sea and had to give in.

One day the admiral (Sir William Kennedy) commanding in the Indian
Ocean a few years ago heard that two Englishwomen had been left on a
desert island by a mail steamer from which they had landed for a
picnic. The steamer was bound to go on. The women were not missed
till too late. So the captain telegraphed to the Admiral from the next
port. The Admiral at once went to the island in his flagship, found
the women with their dresses all torn to ribbons on the rocks, measured
them for sailor suits himself, and had them properly rigged