"the yacht."

She was easily one of the cleanest ships afloat. Her blue-black side,
anointed daily with some mysterious compound rubbed on with serge, a
compound the exact ingredients of which were known only to her
commander and the painter who mixed it, was as smooth and as shiny as a
mahogany table. Her decks were as clean as scrubbers, holystones,
sand, and perspiring blue-jackets could make them, and woe betide the
careless sailor who defiled their sacred whiteness with a spot of
paint, or the stoker who left the imprint of a large and greasy foot on
emerging into the fresh air from his labours in the engine-room or
stokehold.

Her guns, steel, and brass-work winked and shimmered in the sun. Her
funnels were brushed over at frequent intervals with a wash the colour
and consistency of cream, and before she went to sea her yellow masts
and yards used to be swathed in canvas lest they should be defiled by
funnel smoke. Her boats, with their white enamel inside and out, their
black gunwales with the narrow golden ribbon running round inside, the
well-scrubbed masts, oars, thwarts, bottom-boards, and gratings, the
brass lettered backboards, and cushioned sternsheets, were the pride of
her midshipmen and the envy of nearly all the other young gentlemen in
the squadron.

But then, of course, this all happened in the "good old days," the
palmy days when men-of-war spent no great portion of their time at sea
and when, in some ships, Messrs. Spit and Polish were still the
presiding deities. No doubt, as we were sometimes asked to believe
before the war, the Service has gone to the dogs since 1900, for noisy
and blatant Mr. Gunnery has usurped the place of the above-mentioned
pair and life generally has become more strenuous. The ability to hit
a hostile ship at a distance of twenty miles or so cannot be inculcated
in the fastnesses of a harbour. The job simply must be taken seriously.

* * * * *

If you turn up her name in the "Navy List" of to-day--wild horses will
not make me disclose it and the Censor would not pass it if I did--you
will see that she still figures as a cruiser, though the fact remains
that she never goes to sea for any war-like purpose. They have even
added insult to injury by removing some of her guns.

This may be a matter for deep regret on the part of her officers and
men, who, since they belong to the Royal Navy or the Royal Naval
Reserve, naturally long to a