commence to dip into the inevitable books and to talk, such chances as he can get without invading discipline, with a deck officer or an engineer. The very fact that you have to watch the compass day by day, aye, and hour by hour, to see to it that variation and deviation do not betray you by playing unobserved monkey-shines with the way the needle points is a good illustration of how promptly you are dependent on theory in the simplest process of getting a ship from port to port.

It pays a man to buy Lecky's Wrinkles in Practical Navigation. It is not a book to be read through chapter by chapter, but a book to dip into almost any place it opens and read on till your inclination is gone. You'll have something to repay you for the time you spend on it. The book is expensive, costs six dollars in England and twelve dollars here, but it is a good companion for a beginner, just as it is the trusted associate of veterans, and it has a place of peculiar affection among seamen such as no other book can ever hope to have. It is a book for the deck department, not for the engineroom. Then there are several books that cost fifty cents or thereabouts, such as the Mariners' Handbook, published by the Inter

national Correspondence Schools and sold to anybody without having to be enrolled for a course with them, and a book published in England for a shilling (twenty-five cents) called Questions and Answers in Navigation that, for the deck, is almighty useful. The great United States book on theoretical navigation is Bowditch's American Practical Navigator, and it is a great book and a good book to own, but a little over-technical for a man just getting his grip. In the end you'll have to turn to it, but it will baffle you at the first.

You will want to buy a sextant after you have been at sea a few months to train yourself in just the cleverness necessary for handling the instrument, taking observations in all kinds of weather. This isn't theory, but a knack of eye and hand that requires considerable practice before your mind is left free for the theory of which a sextant is the instrument.

The supervising engineer of the greatest civilian fleet that ever has operated under the United States flag says that to his mind the best book a young coal-passer or fireman can have in his sea-bag is McAndrews's Floating School, published by the International Marine Engineering Company, and that the next

step in reading for a man is Durand's Marine Engineering.

There is an admirable book, Hillcoat's Notes on Stowage, that gives a world of information about the peculiarities in different kinds of cargo that you have to bear in mind. as you fill your ship's holds.

Walton's Know Your Own Ship is a great standby for sailormen who want to understand ship construction and all the strains and other forces that play upon her once she is built.

A good book on the laws of storms, so far as anybody understands them, with lots of experiences told that various ships have had with winds and waters, is Allingham's Manual of Marine Meteorology.

By the time you have done this much with theory you will be ready to study with more system and will have got a line on the books and the schools that are necessary.

VII

SHIPPING AVOCATIONS

HERE are a good many slack hours in

THERE

a ship for both officers and men and both at sea and in port. People think of sailors as much more active than they actually are. Many a ship's officer needs dumb-bells to keep in good condition, particularly on a long voyage, and the crew aren't always swarming up and down rigging. In these slack hours a man with a ready mind who uses a little forethought, times he is in port, to get material for his mind, can fit himself to get ahead in his work and to take a lot more satisfaction in the life he is leading day by day. The trouble with most men is that they are lazier mentally than they are physically. Sailors drive into all kinds of ports, the very names of which make a man's mouth water, and you think they must be alive to a lot of mysterious things in the world. But you talk with the run of them, officers or crew, and you'll find only too often

that about all they know of the ports are the docks and the loafing and dissipating places. A man who means to get ahead and to have a happy life aboard ship while he is getting ahead and after he has got to the head ought to keep wide awake about a lot of things, big and little, that his life at sea touches.

A man ought to study astronomy. Any fool can work navigation without knowing much astronomy. Eight or ten stars that he can recognize will give him a chance to "get past the old man." But what's the use of it? There's time aplenty to try out all the navigational stars, and to be interested in a lot of them that aren't of any particular use for navigational purposes. Then there's the whole range of spectral astronomy, the most important modern development of the subject, that's of no imaginable use for navigation, but opens up the relationship between astronomy and chemistry, and is the greatest fairy-tale in the world. A book like Flammarion's on spectral astronomy gives a man all the lead he needs. Looking up at the sky won't help him much at it, the way it does with what you might call geographical astronomy, but it heightens a man's sense of understanding as he looks up at the stars, and gives him new thrills as he