I would not permit them to learn any other language than
their own. And how about seamanship? What do they know about that? As
far as I have observed they know nothing about marling-spike
seamanship, strapping blocks, fitting rigging, etc. Now I can sit down
alongside of any seaman doing a bit of work and show him how it ought
to be done; yes, and do it myself." It was Marryat's lieutenant,
Phillott, _ipsissimis verbis_. I listened, over-awed by the weight of
authority and experience; and I fear somewhat in sympathy, for such
talk was in the air, part of the environment of an old order slowly
and reluctantly giving way to a new.

Of course I shared this; how should I not, at eighteen? In giving
expression to it once, I drew down on my head a ringing buffet from my
father, in which he embodied an anecdote of Decatur I never saw
elsewhere, and fancy he owed to his boyhood passed near a navy-yard
town--Portsmouth, Virginia--while Decatur was in his prime. I had
written home with reference to some study, in which probably I did not
shine, "What did Decatur know about such things?" A boy may be
pardoned for laying himself open to the retort which so many of his
superiors equally invited: "Depend upon it, if Decatur had been a
student at the Academy, he would, so far as his abilities permitted,
have got as far to the front as he always did in fighting. He always
aimed to be first. It is told of him that he commanded one of two
ships ordered on a common service, in which the other arrived first at
a point on the way. Her captain, instead of pushing forward, waited
for Decatur to come up; on hearing which the latter exclaimed in his
energetic way, 'The d----d fool!'" Decatur, however, also shared, and
shared inevitably, the prepossessions of his day. I was told by Mr.
Charles King, when President of Columbia College, that he had been
present in company with Decatur at one of the early experiments in
steam navigation. Crude as the appliances still were, demonstration
was conclusive; and Decatur, whatever his prejudices, was open to
conviction. "Yes," he said, gloomily, to King, "it is the end of our
business; hereafter any man who can boil a tea-kettle will be as good
as the best of us." It is notable that in my day a tradition ran that
Decatur himself was not thoroughly a seaman. The captain of the first
ship in which I served after graduation, a man of much solid
information, who had known the commodore's contemporaries, spea