A MAN'S character is the sum of his nature and training; but in practice, if you take your man young enough, Nature has precious little to do with it. Take any man you please and souse him young in the Metropolitan Police system; after a year or so, his feet will have expanded and you will have that paragon of order - a London policeman. Take the same man and set him down in Whitechapel seven years; you will then have a paragon of disorder and immorality. And yet their natures originally were indistinguishable.

Similarly, when you take a boy of fifteen and set him to do man's work under responsibility, you get what, to all intents and purposes, is a man. And a man who is all the more valuable to you because the sap and juices of youth are still alive within him. The youth of him will not destroy; it simply hardens and sets; so that his strength and action may increase. And if you cleverly and gradually work up his load, harden his work, and double his responsibilities, one day he will turn over and crystallise-unless, indeed, he breaks up entirely, which does sometimes happen, and is very awkward for everybody concerned - and then the work is done. You have a man-boy, which is the finest working animal alive; the soul of the man and the spirit of the boy together.

This was the system which had made Borley ; though had you said so to him he would not have understood it. In fact, he would have asked you what the blue, blind, blackberry you were talking about. Borley's language, on occasions, could be extremely picturesque. Once it is recorded that the Port Admiral had stood on the jetty and seen him ram his picquet-boat into the corner of the wall by the Excellent Steps, bows on; but that on hearing Borley's remarks to the leading stoker in particular, and the universe in general, the great man had turned sorrowfully away with his hasty speech unspoken. He had felt, no doubt, that anything he might have to add would be superfluous, and went home to interview his wife; while Borley, backing out of the wall with his stem pointing over the quarter, smiled grimly and returned aboard to the Commander, to whom he explained that he had been confused by the look on the Admiral's face, and that the engines had refused to go astern exactly at the critical moment. Which may or may not have been true, but was, in any case, ungrateful.

Now Borley was in every respect an ordinary person. Nobody had ever mistaken him for a genius, and nobody - except a few flighty and irresponsible Commanders - had ever accused him of being an idiot. And Commanders, of course, as everyone knows, are always wrong, and should never be taken seriously.

At school, where he had been for three years before joining the Britannia, he had always been considered an extremely ordinary person, with that strongly-developed tendency towards idleness and dirt which has distinguished the private schoolboy from the rest of God's creatures since private schools first began. His official character, as described in the reports which went home at the end of each term, was "good," while his conduct for the term was usually entitled " fair "-a fact which occasioned Borley's mother no little pain and astonishment, and caused his father to lecture him severely on the necessity of good behaviour and due respect for authority even at private schools. These little incidents in no way increased Borley's love for those institutions, and it having been decided that he should go into the Navy, he, who had stood for two and a half years, more or less, on ink-stained forms, firing surreptitious pellets of chewed paper at his less fortunate class-mates, looked forward with considerable interest to the time when he should cease to be a little boy and become at once a gentleman and an officer in Her Majesty's Fleet. So that when the results of the exam. were read out and he was found to have just scraped in on his first attempt by the skin of his teeth, it was only in accordance with the fitness of things that two leaden ink-pots should follow one another in quick succession through the windows of the classroom in which the work had been done, and that Jackson minor, his mortal enemy, should be found blubbering in a corner with two of the finest black eyes which had ever been seen at the school.

In due course, Borley arrived aboard the Britannia, with a new kit, a large outfitter's bill, and a sweet smile. He thought he was now a great man, whom sentries would salute. That notion, however, came off in half an hour, and he sought wildly for a new level; which was soon found for him - automatically.

For the first two months the whole thing seemed to him a huge joke. The great sea-chest, with its wash-hand basin and looking-glass, its tills and partitions and racks for telescopes; its brass plate and enormous lock, reminded him of Drury Lane whenever he looked at it. It stood in its appointed place among sixty others, arranged in rows all down the first-term sleeping-deck, and it constituted for the next five years his home and his room and his whole earthly possession. But now, at first, he thought it simply curious. The great, broad decks, too, the drills and bugles always round him, the huge assemblies from which he was marched off to work, the great tank-bath of salt water which the whole sixty went through every morning, the hammock out of which he fell so variously and often every other night, were all so strange and new that it took him some time to learn how to conduct the very simplest operations of life. A ship is extremely different from a house, and running up a hatch is a very different matter from going upstairs, as Borley soon discovered - to his cost. Everything was new. He had to unlearn nearly all he had ever learnt. His mind was being ploughed up preparatory to being sown with the new seed, and this ploughing lasts about two months. He was amazed and delighted. But soon his mind turned over and he found a new point of view. Which is the beginning of the sowing. He saw things more clearly, and began to be a little unhappy; which was very natural, for all his old lines of thought had been broken up and he had nothing as yet to lean on in their place. Besides, there was a certain amount of bullying and fagging to be gone through which occasionally came to nearly as much as he could stand; and he began to think almost kindly of the private school he had left so far behind him. It was a tedious job, the sowing, at first, and very harrowing for Borley, who could not see what was being done for him ; yet there were sixty others going through it with him, and he supposed it was the usual thing, and wrote constantly to his people that he enjoyed it immensely. Which pleased them and made it no worse for Borley.

The worst of it was, though, that besides being bullied and annoyed by the " sixers " and " niners," he was being made to think by the instructors. And this was very new indeed. At school he had always been informed that his particular brain was a negligible quantity, and that the less he used it for himself the better it would be for him. Let him do always exactly what he was told to do, and no more, and all would be well. As for any independent thought, it was absurd; he was far too young for anything of the sort. A nice thing, said the pedagogues, if all the young men in the world were to start reasoning! Why, our occupation would be gone ! Do we reason ? Why, then, should they ? Increase the cricket, multiply the football, build new fives-courts, pocket new fees, and stick close by the sainted time-tables. So shall we turn out men. And Borley was rolled smiling into the Britannia an infant. But once there, the grip closed in upon him, and he was made to work his torpid brain and to reason and to think; and the fight was very great. Alas ! for the warm and comfortable class-rooms, the exact set task, the matron's cares, the spacious, airy bedroom ! Alas ! also, for privacy and comfort ! Borley never knew what privacy was. He ate and slept, and bathed and drilled, and dressed and prayed on an open deck, with nothing there but his sea-chest, and surrounded by a hundred youngsters doing more or less the same thing at precisely the same times every day. And he felt it very much.

They took him in the early morning and put him in a boat with twelve others to teach him how to pull an oar. The mornings were cold, and each stroke was pulled in slow time, with the wind cutting off the hills, nobody daring to speak. Borley nearly died. They took him ashore while it was yet dark, and taught him how to salute the cliffs behind the gymnasiums for half an hour at a time. They ran him over the masthead and bellowed at him from the forecastle below ; he slipped and barked his shins. He had thought himself already an Officer, they showed him that he was hardly yet a lower sort of Man. They treated him severely, and the second-term boys laughed consumedly. As was very natural. But the end came at last ; and when Borley went home for his five weeks' Christmas leave, he assumed the airs of a young upper-yardman, and referred to his elder brother at Eton, with fine contempt, as a " beastly civilian." At dinner, too, he laid down naval law with such extreme ignorance and vigour that his father had no difficulty in prophesying for him a great and useful career as a Lord of the Admiralty; and, this discovery being communicated to the county, Borley became an authority. Which, as the result of the first sowing, was fairly creditable. The Eton brother stamped with envy, and perceived for the first time that life is a hollow sham - a perception which, they say, he maintains even to this day.

Next term things looked better - much better. There were now some "news" below him, whom he found he could revile and persecute in a small back-handed way. For he was only a "three" or second-termer even now, and had no power of life and death at all. That was all reserved for the next year. But he could only be fagged by the fourth termers, who were tired of fagging, and who left him, therefore, very much alone, having other fish to fry. They were very nearly Officers in the Fleet now, and bullying had done its work for them. So Borley was not worried much in that way. But he had to settle down to worries from the other side. The term was to end with an examination, in which failure meant not merely a "bad report," nor the pompous warnings of a scantily respected head-master, but a real and absolute life-failure, a return to tweed suits and horn buttons, a reversion to intolerable youth. So Borley laid down to his work in fierce terror, and found it not uninteresting. In fact, although he kept the fact concealed, there were many parts which he almost enjoyed. The steam study, with its little engine worked from an invisible boiler in the next ship, became interesting from sheer familiarity. And gradually becoming aware of its vast ingenuity, he caught himself wondering whether the engines which took him home were as neat as this, and where they stowed their condensers, and whether they had triple or quadruple expansions. Absurd enough to the engineer, but a great step for Borley. He wanted to know now. He had seldom wanted to know before.

With his book-work, too, things began to look differently. Mathematics at school he had always hated; Euclid and Algebra his mind had utterly abhorred. But here, by constant hourly practice, he had learnt the strange and ancient tongue, and found a new pleasure in the deadly problems, the short clear statements, the crisp neat solutions, and the thousand little labour-saving evasions with which his brain was made to play. And Trigonometry - that Volapuk of Mathematics - which he had at first imagined to be hopelessly beyond him, now just helped him on to higher things. Borley was growing clearly now, and the grave Instructors, suckled on " x," who had been several times round the world and always reasoned before speaking, passed the word to that effect as they came up harbour in the snorting little steam-pinnace from Kingswear Pontoon in the mornings.

Besides this, he could pull an oar with anyone in the ship, and had even been tried for the racing cutter of his watch, which was a great honour, and gave him full authority to be amused at the antics of the " news," who splashed and struggled round the ship in slow time. Also he had done a little surreptitious fagging at times of these same " news," and no fagging afterwards ever seemed so delightful as this, done when he had no power to do it. And he felt that it was for their good, too. In his first term he had been fagged and worried in every conceivable way. Big " niners," who are gentlemen in their fourth term, had come and spoilt his afternoons to make him pick nuts for them in the various forbidden woods ashore; or had run him out to Stoke Fleming to keep tables for their tea ; or had made him tow them, panting, to the top of the hill from the boat-shed to the kennels, holding on to his coat-tails ; and had occasionally fagged him to bring " stodge " on board, which was against the rules, and called for resource and nerve. But Borley was especially good at this, and would come smiling up the gangways with the sock above his boots full of stick-jaw and Turkish delight, and a look of such profound innocence on his face that the hearts of the stony ship's corporals at the top were touched, and he was allowed to pass, in sheer joyous admiration of his pluck. Then the smuggled goods would be turned over to the great man who had ordered them, to be eaten by him or sold at double price to others from his private till. For this, of course, Borley got no praise, but it taught him to take risk early, and showed clearly that the Custom of the Service is always to be set before poor, wooden-headed rules and mere official reputation.

Once, indeed, he was discovered, through the careless packing of a piece of chocolate in his cap, which rolled out on the deck as he stooped through the entry port and gave him up to justice. But beyond this he had come through it all unscathed and much improved, even as he sought now, against the law, to improve the unlucky ones below him. For now his bad times were nearly over; next term he would be a different creature, able to wear stick-up collars in the evening and swing his keys, and wear his cap on the back of his head, and put his childish days behind him, and fag and bully to any extent, and be a full-blown " sixer." That examination was the fence at which he was set, and Borley gathered himself together for a mighty spring which should make him secure at least for another year, and land him in a different and a better life. For seven days he fought it out with Fate, at desk and oar, with sail and pen, for all he knew. Sometimes things looked black against him, and he would stuff his head under the little horsehair pillow in his hammock and try to think he hadn't failed that day, at least. The tweed suits and horn buttons seemed monstrous near at those times, and the bare notion of failure made him shudder and swing with horror, till the men on his bar objected, and he had to steady down and say Euclid quietly over till he went to sleep. But he passed quite easily, and when he learnt the news, at home, he went into the smoking-room after dinner and solemnly poured out a whisky and soda to drink to his new-found manhood.

Up to now Borley had been taught Humility. Henceforward his lesson was the value of Power. Hitherto a wretched slave, he returned to find his former masters departed and himself installed in their place. The change was very great and extremely delightful ; but it was rather more than he could bear. The awful weight of inferiority had been lifted from his soul, and now the danger was lest he should soar too high. He was as happy as the days were long, but in his inmost soul he feared the new position. The exaggerated fear and respect with which he was treated by the " news," and the air of swagger and superiority he was called on to assume towards them, were too strange to be assimilated all at once. And, knowing his incompetence and fearing lest it should be apparent, he rushed into an extreme of tyranny towards them which was clean against his nature. And this being equally the case with his sixty term-mates, the "news" of that time were very unhappy - even as he had been the year before and longed, though they dared not ask, for the easier guidance of a private school. This is the real reason of Britannia bullying. It arises not, as the poor " new " imagines, from the innate savagery of his persecutors, but from the huge pressure of example and tradition which, seizing them in the exact weak moment of change from fearfulness to power, swings them irresistibly into methods entirely foreign to their natures. The result is necessary and inevitable, and no number of parents with letters to the Times can ever in any way alter it. Nor would an alteration be useful. A process which, in two years, turns sixty little schoolboys into sixty officers and gentlemen of the sort now required for Her Majesty's Fleet, must necessarily involve certain hardships for those schoolboys if the work is to be really done. In judging of an omelette, the lamentable fate of the eggs which compose it is entirely beside the question. We must judge solely of the omelette. Similarly with the Navy. Are naval officers brutalised much, or coarsened ? I somehow fancy not. They have been through the fire and have come out, tempered and hardened if you like, but of vastly improved quality as well. So Borley, swallowed up in the system, unknowing and unsuspecting, breathed forth the traditions of three hundred years with shouts into the new ears and keys on to the new hands, till their lives became a burden and their souls waxed thin within them. It was brutal, no doubt, and at first seemed intolerable enough ; but soon came meaning through the misery, and they looked and saw and held their tongues and bore it well and patiently, as English gentlemen should, hoping for the better time to come. And when it came, they, in turn, were precisely as had been those before them.

From this time Borley moved steadily on through the Britannia training, always learning, always ready, always denying that he knew anything, always sucking in fresh facts, always apparently idle, always with one eye on the next examination, until the last and final passing-out into the Fleet came round, which made him a real Officer on the Active List, and he went home for the last time in a brand-new Service overcoat, delivered in advance from his outfitters to give him an air of authority to his sisters when he should get home, and to the railway porters while he was getting there.

Never since Fleets first went to sea had there been so tremendous a fellow as Borley during those few weeks of his last leave in England. His speech was strangely interlarded with nautical and mathematical expressions, and his walk was the roll of Nelson's captains. His new dirk - ordered, with the overcoat, in advance - came out of its case twice a day to be admired by the family circle and carefully wrapped up again. Woe betide anyone who touched its gleaming surface without due permission! That dirk was the emblem of Borley's Sea-Power. He was now, indeed, a great man. But one morning a blue paper came down from a clerk at the Admiralty, and Borley was whirled to Liverpool, dirk and chest and all, and swung across the Atlantic Ocean, and hammered through the Continent of America, and thumped sideways down mountain-gorges, and chafed and battered and swirled and banged, till ho ! he had reached the strange place to which he had been appointed; and here he found a ship waiting, ready to take him away. Then began yet another life, but a life more various and infinitely more amusing than any of the preceding ones, a life full of interest and action, of danger and responsibility, calling for resource and strength of brain and arm alike. And though the various incidents of this life were new to Borley, yet he took very kindly to them all by reason of his former lives, which had been designed, as he now began to see, to that end. His chest was put in the Midshipman's Flat just over the engine-room hatch, and here he lived absolutely in public without the slightest sort of inconvenience, for he had done with inconvenience two years before on the first-term sleeping-deck. He had to rush and jump and fly like a lamp-lighter at an order, and no excuses were taken. But he did this without thinking and constantly without any notion of what the order he had received might have been, because he had done it habitually for two whole years before. He was given a boat to run, and soon that boat was the smartest in the ship, because he had learnt by sad experience exactly what was necessary, and had natural sense enough to take care that it was done.

But besides these, there were many really new things to get hold of before he was finally finished with. New conditions sprang up, and ticklish situations which tried his power of command. Some of these made Borley jump at first, but he always got safely through them in the end. At night he would go ashore to bring off liberty-men, and coming in, two miles from the ship, would find a howling mob, six deep and rocking with poisoned drink waiting for him on the pier-head. These had to be brought off quickly and safely; he was entirely responsible. There were heavy jobs like this, and Borley was barely sixteen. But with luck and persuasion, and occasionally the butt of a sailing-tiller to emphasise remarks, he managed very well, and usually came off without accident or trouble. Of course he picked up well-tried, old-time dodges, too, from his mess-mates in the gun-room, who had come to sea before him, and had been his persecutors in the Britannia. He found them now strangely altered, and very delightfully full of stories of adventure in the past and hope for adventure in the future, and all anxious to help and tell him what to do and when in the various adventures he was bound to meet sooner or later. His mathematics, also, were kept gently simmering by a young chaplain-naval-instructor, fresh from Greenwich; and in the long night watches of calm, lonely cruising, when the engines were stopped and studd' sails set both sides, the Officer of the Watch would walk him round the heavens, star by star, till he knew them all as old friends, and could go his rounds to lights and look-outs and sentries, feeling that his circle of acquaintance had been largely and pleasantly increased. He learnt his work aloft, too, first as Midshipman of the Main top - where you are under the Eye on the poop - and then in the Fore-top, where things are more complicated, and the Eye cannot see so well. And in a month the interest of it took hold of him, and he became a first-rate Top Midshipman, one to whom each second in an evolution is of deadly, earnest importance, to whom every hail and pipe and call means an instant definite something, to whom ropes and blocks and swivels are as the framework of his soul. In one month Borley was as active as a monkey, as eager as a fox-hound, and as cunning as both. No excitement is quite so tremendous as that of ship-against-ship sail drill, and Borley went completely mad three times a day. But in that madness was always the knowledge that men's lives were in the scale, and that one single slip, a false order, or mistaken signal might lay them, groaning, at his charge.

Thus, from day to day and hour by hour, was Borley shepherded up into something as near a man as a boy of seventeen can be got to. Not suddenly, but very gradually it had been done, and for the first year the strain had been great. But once in the groove, he had slid on and upwards almost of his own volition; so that at seventeen he was not only ready but able to go anywhere, high or low, east or west, and do almost anything. Later on he went to other ships and learnt other things, such as the art and mystery of keeping station, when to call the Captain, the pride and power of the Flagship's signal bridge, the secret follies of Admirals, and the ways of coal in bunkers. But this was all mere polish and embroidery; the solid work had been done, and Borley was a made man.

He is now in the Mediterranean, and handles a semaphore or drills a battery with equal ease and grace. He has been finished for over two years, and his chest is right down in the steering engine flat, next to the high-press. cylinder.

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