BRIGANTINE "STEADFAST."
Nor is the industrial side forgotten in the system of training on the Exmouth. Tailoring, carpentering, painting, sail and net-making, and so on, are part of the trades the boys have to learn and to prove efficient at. Indeed, most of the extensive and often difficult repairs constantly necessary to the three-decker, to her many boats, and to the boys' own outfits, are done by the latter, and done by these youngsters remarkably well, as, reader, you will see for yourself, if your good fortunes ever ship you to the Exmouth. I say advisedly "good fortunes," because there is a healthiness, a breeziness about the ship, about its captain, officers, and numerous crew which truly smacks of the free, wholesome, bracing sea, and which cannot fail to act upon the visitor from the town as an excellent nerve-tonic.
MUSICAL DRILL.
This healthiness, this breeziness, as it were, this sea-atmosphere is, however, easily accounted for by the very nature, by the very purpose of the vessel. Is not the aim of the education, of the training, on board the Exmouth above all to produce sailors of the type of those who have made England what she is to-day—the Queen and the beneficent Ruler Of the Oceans and the foremost colonizing and civilizing Power on earth? Naturally, to achieve this aim the tasks which devolve alike upon instructors and instructed are manifold and heavy. How many thousand and one details have to be taught—and learned? How many thousand and one minute elements are necessary to the making of genuine seamen of these boys? As kindly paymaster, Mr. A. Thompson, puts it in his "Exmouth Song":—
They are to be bothered with splice and knot,
With heads and hitches and I don't know what;
So many, they can't tell t'other from which;
Nor a double Matthew Walker from a plain clove hitch.
AT MESS.
But it quickly comes all right; the instructors and the lads' hearts are in their work. Thus:—