Master.

$375.00 or $337.50 or $325.00 or $312.50 or $300.00

The pay of all the lesser official rankings and all the ratings is identical whatever size or class the ship:

Not all of these rankings and ratings are on every ship. Only the largest ships, for

instance, carry both wipers and oilers in the engine-room; an oiler does both jobs in the other ships. The same is true of refrigerating engineers and deck engineers, of fourth officers, of storekeepers. There is certain additional pay for overtime work and sometimes subsistence when a crew has to eat away from the ship while in a port, but the scale as it stands indicates fairly the filthy-lucre point of view on ordinary life at

sea.

II

HOW TO GET TO SEA

F, then, you've decided you want to go and that you want to go in a merchantship instead of the navy, there are a number of ways you can have a try at it. The old, time-honored way is a good one. Hang around a dock, pick out a ship you like, find out where she is going, try a "Say, mister," to the mate, and ask him to sign you on as ordinary seaman if you are as old as eighteen or of good size for your age at seventeen, and if younger get him to take you as deckboy. This way of doing requires that you be in a town that is a port. Sometimes the hardest problem for a fellow who is bit by this zest for the sea is to get from his home town to a port. The old, time-honored way for that used to be to leave a note for the folks and slide out the bedroom window some moonlight night, jumping a freight-train as it rattled through, and landing in the seaport town with a dollar and an appetite. When

you are at the age that you are nothing but a pair of lungs and a pair of legs it's none so bad as a plan and is still largely used in developing what we may call volunteer recruitment for sea service. Personal liberty is being interfered with so much nowadays, however, that many shipping-offices and shipping-commissioners ask for written consent of parents before signing on a lad, so it is well to get the family reconciled to your scheme and leave by the front door with a little more money and luggage. It is fairer to your folks and makes an easier retreat to the home base in case of temporary disaster. Still, it doesn't try out your nerve as well as the other, and your nerve will have to be tried out in one way or another before you have gone far in your sea career.

Seamen are kind. If, with or without your parents' co-operation, you are trying to place yourself direct aboard a ship and can't get to the mate to ask him about it, chum up with the boatswain or one of the sailors who looks companionable and get him to take you to the mate or the "old man." Or go to the shipping-offices. In New York City the Standard Oil Company has one in Pearl Street; the Shipping Board maintains one in Washington Street, down near the Bat

tery. You can learn of others by hanging around either of those.

If you would rather be introduced to the service instead of jimmying your way in, the Shipping Board maintains a training system at various ports-Boston, New Orleans, San Francisco, Cleveland—where you can be received if you come within certain age and weight limits and get a couple of months' training aboard one of their ships and then be sent to sea. You won't be as far ahead this way in either money or capability as you will be by trying the practical, direct method, but it is an easier and surer way of getting started than the other.

If you are sure about your intention of staying at sea for some years at least, the state nautical school-ships can hardly be beat as a way of getting thorough, high-class training in both seamanship and navigation and the ways of both sail and steam. There are only two such ships at present, the Newport at New York and the Ranger at Boston. Pennsylvania used to have one, but passed it up. But plans afoot seem to promise more of them, probably half a dozen, distributed on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, the Great Lakes, and the Gulf of Mexico, so that there will be room enough for as many boys as