eason to believe
the time at hand when we can dispense with a corps of seamen, the
specialty of which is infantry--and shore expedition when necessary.
Patriotism, as our marine understood it, was sticking by your colors
and your corps, and doing your duty through thick and thin; no bad
ideal.

In like mingling of good and evil, the oldsters at the Naval Academy,
along with some things objectionable, including a liberty that under
the conditions too often resembled license, brought with them sound
traditions, which throughout my stay there constituted a real _esprit
de corps_. In nothing was this more conspicuous than in the attitude
towards hazing. Owing to circumstances I will mention later, I entered
at once the class which, as I understand, most usually perpetrated the
outrageous practices that became a scandal in the country--the class,
that is, which is entering on its second year at the Academy. My home
having always been at the Military Academy, I, without much thinking,
expected to find rife the same proceedings which had prevailed there
from time to me immemorial. Such anticipations made deeper and more
lasting the impression produced by the contrary state of things, and
yet more by the wholly different tone prevalent at Annapolis. Not only
was hazing not practised, but it scarcely obtained even the
recognition of mention; it was not so much reprobated as ignored; and,
if it came under discussion at all, it was dismissed with a turn of
the nose, as something altogether beneath us. That is not the sort of
thing we do here. It may be all very well at West Point--much as "what
would do for a marine could not be thought of for a seaman"--but we
were "officers and gentlemen," and thought no small beans of ourselves
as such. There were at times absurd manifestations of this same
precocious dignity, of which I may speak later; still, as O'Brien said
of Boatswain Chucks, "You may laugh at such assumptions of gentility,
but did any one of his shipmates ever know Mr. Chucks to do an
unhandsome or a mean action?--and why? Because he aspired to be a
gentleman."

While I can vouch for this general state of feeling, I cannot be sure
of its derivation; but I have always thought it due to the presence
during the previous five years of the "oldsters," nominally under the
same discipline as ourselves, but looked up to with the respect and
observance which at that age are naturally given to those two or three
seasons older. A