id not reach
the zenith of fame to which the modern commander has risen. The average
present-day captain has little in common with his predecessors. His
political creed goes beyond the mere assertion of the superiority of
Britishers over foreigners. He claims association with a party, and
knows a good deal about prominent statesmen and politicians. He is up
to date in the causes which led to the Boer War, the Coal Tax, the Corn
Duty, Irish Land Purchase, the Education Act, and Chamberlain's
agitation to force a change in our fiscal policy from Free Trade to
Protection. He has a peculiar form of self-confidence which may be
considered phenomenal though it is rarely offensive.

VI

MARY ROUTLEDGE

I have often come in contact with old people living in the villages
close by the sea and far away from the bustle of railroads and large
towns, who lament the good times gone by when they used to look forward
to the homecoming and the passing to and fro of the bonny sailor lads,
who were always expected to lift the monotony from their dull,
uneventful lives by strange stories and rollicking habits. The
villagers for the most part lived under a kind of despotism. The Lord
of the Manor and the parson dominated them, and fashioned their
politics, their religion, and even their social lives. The rule was to
keep within the limits of their own little community when they wanted a
wife or a husband, but if at any time their affections travelled
outside this sanctified boundary, the two potentates were assiduous in
their warnings that if the new comer in any way transgressed the
unwritten code of laws that were framed in order that the estate might
be kept free from contamination they would have to leave it
peremptorily. Ranters, Wesleyans, and other Nonconformists were
regarded as heretics. A religious test was practised, and those who
openly avowed their dissent from the established form of worship were
frankly told that there was a strong aversion to having that manner of
person about the place, and that any attempt at proselytising would be
met by immediate expulsion. That was the state of things existent in a
certain country village no further back than the middle of the last
century, when, as though Providence had pre-arranged it, a man who at
one time had been a sailor came to live there. He was tall and
well-made, with broad shoulders, and he walked with a sort of military
tread. He had a broad forehead, firmly set l