costs no more than a bottle of Ratcliffe Highway brandy, and for the genuineness and efficacy of which the managers pledge their reputation. This fact made plain to Jack, he immediately tacks about, declares that "bad is the best" as regards both buoys and belts, and asserts his belief that at a pinch they are but little better than instruments of torture, keeping a man up very likely while he starves by inches, instead of going down at once and being saved all the suffering. This was positively the argument used to me by an ancient mariner of the Royal Mail Packet Service, and that in the presence of the most convincing evidence to the contrary which could possibly be set before a man. The occasion was the return to Southampton Docks of the "Douro" from the island of St Thomas, after the memorable hurricane at the end of 1867, which devastated that place and the ships that were lying in harbour there—among others the mail steamers Rhone and Wye. From the former vessel one of the few rescued by means of a life-buoy was a lad named Bailey. There were only seven buoys on board the ship, and four out of the seven were the means of saving so many of the crew. The lad Bailey obtained his buoy in a somewhat miraculous manner. When the Rhone smashed up, and the few survivors of her crew were clinging to ragged splinters of wreck in the furious sea, Bailey, who was holding on to a spar, saw at a little distance an able seaman girt with a life-buoy; but, as he enviously watched the fortunate A.B., one of the sharks with which those terrible waters abound nipped the man in two below the waist, and in his agony the poor fellow flung up his arms. The result was that the remainder of the body slipped through the buoy, leav ing it vacant. Being a marvellously cool hand for his age, the lad Bailey swam to the abandoned article and slipped his head and shoulders through it. Beat out to sea, worn out and exhasted, he fell asleep without knowing it, by good fortune grasping the side cords tightly in his hands. Hours afterwards he was cast up on the beach, the rasping against the shingle waking him; and there for I saw it myself-was the impress, in the soaked yellow paint, of Master Bailey's hair, where his heavy head had rested on it. The ancient mariner of the "Douro " saw it too, but still he shook his thick old head, and regarded Master Bailey as if he thought, that, for the credit of a favourite. nautical delusion, it would have been more becoming in him to let the buoy alone, and sunk without any fuss. It is a grave fact, however, that Jack speaks only half the truth when he assigns as a reason for not adopting the life-belt, his independent conviction that he is quite as well off without it. Were he to reveal his mind with perfect candour, he would confess that those who are in authority over him-in the merchant service, that is to say-iniquitously, and, as they believe, to serve their own ends, do their best to make him ashamed to be seen with either belt or buoy. It is a disgraceful fact, that the most unwelcome visitor on board the majority of the merchant ships lying in our docks is the agent of the Life Boat Association, who comes with the view of persuading the captain or his mate to permit the use of additional life-saving apparatus on board their ships. As tested by the Government order, they carry a notoriously insufficient number of buoys, and openly express their contempt and disapprobation even of these. The excuse is, that they make the men "chicken-hearted." Emigrant ships, no matter what their tonnage or passenger-carrying capacity, are required by the law to carry but four life-buoys and six life-belts, which, in the emergency against which they are expressly provided, would probably save ten lives -certainly no more. Ordinary merchantmen carry but two buoys, and the captain won't have more, though they are offered at the low price of ten shillings each, and each will, with ordinary care, last a dozen years. "I've got seamen aboard my ship," sneered one polite gentleman whose crew reckoned twenty-two; "we don't want life-buoys here, nor any nightcaps, nor no smelling salts, nor warming-pans; and I wish you a very good morning." Another captain spoke out his reason in a much more honest and brutally blunt fashion. "I like my fellows to understand that they've got to keep my craft afloat, or sink with her. Men will work like devils to save their own lives, but how much respect would they have for my property if, a few miles off shore, we were in danger of foundering, and every fellow could dance over the side with one of these nuisances made fast to him!" There were the regulation "two" buoys on board this amiable captain's ship; and one feels curious to learn what, in the event of the calamity at which he hinted, would be his behaviour. Would he cast the "nuisances" left and right, one to the cook and the other to the cabin-boy, and take his bare chance with the rest; or would he, in obedience to " Nature's first law," encircle his waist with one of the charmed rings that make a man proof against death by drowning, and leave his "fellows" to do the best they could? Jack ashore is not given to literature; but he is curious in the matter of "charts," and has a religious belief in all that bears the Admiralty stamp in proof of their authenticity. Does he ever see the Wreck Chart which is published annually? It is no secret to him that many ships are lost at sea, but it is doubtful if he has any idea how many. The Wreck Chart would show him at a glance. It would be specially interesting to Jack the coaster; for of all men who earn bread on salt water, the coasters are those most encouraged by masters and mates to despise a currish leaning towards life-belts-while they are the very fellows, it may be assumed, who might be tempted to abandon the crazy old collier rather than go down with her. Here Jack would see the fair face of the ocean, especially about certain notorious reefs and rocks and banks, hideously dotted-every black dot marking the spot where there has been wreck and death. He would discover places over which he had sailed many a time blotched as closely as the pock-marks on some men's faces. He may read, in the report accompanying the Chart, that hundreds of these wrecks occurred either a few miles from shore, or in a part of the ocean highway so commonly trafficked over that, had the poor fellows whose lives have been sacrificed but possessed the means of holding up in the water for only a few hours, they might have stood a fair chance of rescue. In the matter of life-saving it may sound almost inhuman to discuss the question of "cost;" cost;" to set widows' weeds and orphans' tears on one side of the scales and a few paltry shillings on the other; but still it may be as well that the reader should know what life-belts and life-buoys cost. It is a fact that a manufacturing firm of standing and eminence-that of Messrs Birt, Dock Street-has offered to place the necessary apparatus on any number of ships that may |