or. On one occasion during a drunken quarrel in
the coper's cabin one skipper threw the kerosene lamp over another
lying intoxicated on the floor. His heavy wool jersey soaked in
kerosene caught fire. He rushed for the deck, and then, a dancing mass
of flames, leaped overboard and disappeared.

Occasionally skippers devised punishments with a view to remedying the
defects of character. Thus one lad, who through carelessness had on
more than one occasion cooked the "duff" for dinner badly, was made to
take his cinders on deck when it was his time to turn in, and go
forward to the fore-rigging. Then he had to take one cinder, go up to
the cross-tree, and throw it over into the sea, come down the opposite
rigging and repeat the act until he had emptied his scuttle. Another
who had failed to clean the cabin properly had one night, instead of
going to bed, to take a bucketful of sea water and empty it with a
teaspoon into another, and so to and fro until morning. On one
occasion a poor boy was put under the ballast deck, that is, the cabin
floor, and forgotten. He was subsequently found dead, drowned in the
bilge water. It was easy to hide the results of cruelty, for being
washed overboard was by no means an uncommon way of disappearing from
vessels with low freeboards in the shallow water of the North Sea.

A very practical outcome in the mission work was the organization of
the Fisher Lads' Letter-Writing Association. The members accepted so
many names of orphan lads at sea and pledged themselves to write
regularly to them. Also, if possible, they were to look them up when
they returned to land, and indeed do for them much as the War Camp
Community League members are to-day trying to accomplish for our
soldiers and sailors. As every practical exposition of love must, it
met with a very real response, and brought, moreover, new interests
and joys into many selfish lives.

I remember one lady whose whole care in life had been her own health.
She had nursed it, and worried over it, and enjoyed ill health so
long, that only the constant recourse to the most refined stimulants
postponed the end which would have been a merciful relief--to others.
The effort of letter-writing remade her. Doctors were forgotten,
stimulants were tabooed, the insignia of invalidism banished, and to
my intense surprise I ran across her at a fishing port surrounded by a
bevy of blue-jerseyed lads, who were some of those whom she was being
blessed b