The daily morning journal and courier., 1899-09-07

tilC ctl iNt oCtpillS III dpOul HUH NdccG
 out of five, hard customers in the course
 of their apprenticeship, and not of
 much account either for men-of-war or
 the shore. The reason for this is not 1 hard to discern. Before entering the
 naval service the manageable boys | have had their whirl at juvenile frac- tiousness and mischief and are about
 ready when they find themselves in the l bell-bottom trousers, to pipe down and | to make something out of the opportu- | mites. Being tough, they are not easily
 contaminated by the burly roughness of | speech and manner displayed by the old timers. The milk -and-water boy
 on the contrary, who enters the service | with his mind somewhat too fully
 stored with precepts, maxims rules of
 conduct and shining examples of the great, good and illustrous, and whose shore experience has been derived 1 within radius of two hundred yards from the front gate of his mother S
 yard, steps smack into a world entirely
 new and strange to him when he puts
 his foot over the gangway of man-o'-
 war, and, after the absorbent fashion
 of boys of such type, he immediately | pSsoliao lO DCCOlllt lHUCuldttu WILL llle | purely surface manners of the old
 timers under whom he serves, tries to
 emphasize the roughness of these traits
 in his own person, and sooner or later
 becomes more or less of a rowdy.
 When naval apprentice exhibits a
 desire from the outset of his seafaring
 career to be bad and onery. for the sake l of getting what he thinks is the ap
 proval of the old-time sailors, he is in | a fair way to earn for himself the con 1 tempt of all hands fore and aft The d-timers for the idle purpose of hav- 1 ing fun with such a lad, encourage him
 but they have no actual use for him,
 and never lend their efforts to making
 anything else of him. It is the manly
 boy who declines to be either coddled
 or bulldozed and who, above all. has l controllable tongue In his head, that in-
 variably shows strong in the stretch
 when the race is on for the braided
 blouses and the gilt-ornamented caps
 The rapidity with which boyishness
 is yanked out of very young lads who
 enter the navy is remarkable. From
 his very first day on board either
 training ship or manof-War proper,
 the unfledged youngster is expected to | hop right out of his boyhood and as-
 Sume to all intents and purposes, the | full status of man. He lives among | men who have ranged the world mosf of their lives: he works alongside some | of them, and almost as much work Is | expected of him as of the old timers; he puts up with the same amount of hardship, toes the same mark of disci- pline, and is just as liable to a tour in double irons in the brig for misconduct as his older shipmates who regard the circumnavigation of the globe as bagatele
 The boy who at the outset of his naval life sheds lonesome tear or two in his hammock, but keeps up a brave front when in view of his shipmates is the lad who may be marked for a win ner. It would be out of nature for youngster of any sort of sensibiities to plunge into man-o'-war life with all
 of it's apparent rgidity without being bit taken abaclS and depressed by the roughness of 1t all But the plucky
 boys buckle down and force themselves to become used to if, and even during their lubberly days at sea they never even approach to the verge of deck whimpering. The Little Lord Fauntle- roy sort of lad had better keep out of the navy. The navy Is composed, as a whole, fore and aft, of genuine, mascu- line men, and of men of considerable hidden sentiment, too; but in no envi- ronment is the parade or even the slightest suscpicion of sentimentality more quickly drowned upon than upon the forward deck of a man-of-war. If a blue jacket happens to meet with an accident his sympathetic shipmates. deeply feeling for the injured man, will l assemble around his bunk in the sick | bay and call him damned lubber and a hay huckster for permitting himself to get hurt that way That is their way of expressing sympathy and the | injured man knows 1t and appreciates it, If his shipmates were to condole | with him and mournfully tell him how | sorry they were, and all that sort of | thing, he would promptly turn over in his bunk and tell them all to go to the | devil. In floating community such as man-o'-war, therefore, the boy of l weak heart and of lilylivered vision | can find no habitation of peace, much | less of eventual honor.
 From the purely physical point of | view, pprenticeship in the navy is a | fine thing for a lad Nine out of ten naval apprentices, when they attain | their majorities, are strapping, rugged, brawny men, capable of enduring any amount of hardship, and possessing a quality of health and soundness that is bound to see them through many ups and downs ashore, should they elect to quit the sea when they attain the age of twenty -one-and most of them stay on in the service, by the way. There couldn't well be a much finer physical | specimen than young Breen, of New York city, the ex-apprentice in the navy, who fought with Roosevelts | Rough Riders during the recent war and yet, when he entered the navy, he gave no promise of developing into young fellow who could and did wallop most of the men he went up against in friendly bouts toward the wind-up of his naval service. Of course, in order to get into the navy at all, the appren- tice must be sound of body, but many of the lads only get into the service by narrow margins, owing to their being or of no very rugged charac- ter of DhVEical makp-I1p Opnp tbay