Coaling over and the ship washed down, the forecastle is always alive in the evening with music, vocal and instrumental. Banjos, mandolines, guitars, fiddles, concertinas are brought out and the night resounds with song after song. The harder the day's work has been the heartier is the singing, as a rule.

Naval Songs.

HE days of the old "forebitter," the forecastle

THE

song of the Navy of Marryat's time, are over. One or two may still occasionally-very occasionally -he heard, but as a rule the bluejacket prefers to borrow his songs from the modern music-hall.

He passes from gay to grave and grave to gay with an abruptness that is not a little startling at first. I remember a marine who would sing a quaintly amusing song in a minor key, that had a comic effect all its own, about

"An emigrant-ship ragamuffin

Awaits us on the quay,

For to take two Micks,

With their shovels and their picks,

To the shores of Amerikee."

(He used to alter emigrant to man-o'-war, but left the rest of the verse unchanged, which rather obscured the sense; but nobody troubled about that.)

This rollicking ditty never failed to elicit an encore, whereupon he would return and sing some miserable thing that gave one the blues. But the men thought it all right and proper.

Of dismally sentimental songs that I remember to

have heard on board ship the following were special favourites: "A flower from my angel mother's grave," "Down by the river-side I stray," "See that my grave's kept green," "The little shoeblack," "The blind boy" (We love him, we love him, we love him because he's blind), and "O'er the bridge at midnight" (not Longfellow's poem, but a ghastly thing describing at great length a procession of unhappy people over London Bridge). The gayer varieties are comic songs from the music-hall interspersed with patriotic effusions from the same source.

From time to time one comes across men with fine voices who give us really good things like "The flying Dutchman or "The pirate of the Isles." I wish there were more of them.

On the other hand, the drawing-room songs about "Jack" are often very unreal, and are not much accounted of on the fo'c'sle of a man-of-war. We don't shout "Hilly-hauly, hilly-ho,” or “Yo, heave ho!" in the Navy.

Sometimes bluejackets burst out into songs of their own composing, some of their compositions being very fair specimens. I can hardly say as much for a poem by one of my shipmates, who told us that

Chanties as the songs are called which are used by men as helps in their work with sails and capstan

-belong to the Merchant Service. In the Navy all such work is carried on as quietly as possible, orders being communicated in many cases by means of small hand-flags.

I propose now to give my readers some specimens of the old naval songs, adding the music of the airs where it may seem advisable. For this purpose we cannot do better than follow the lead of Mr. Binding in his nautical selection-"Life on the Ocean." It contains the pick of the old forebitters, together with others that will live as long as there is a bluejacket

or marine to go on the ocean wave" or a

Britannia to rule that wave.

The selection opens with "A life on the ocean wave"-Henry Russell's fine old song, which always does duty for the Royal Navy and Marines when

"They all march past the admiral and his lady at review."

The next song is one of Dibdin's-" The lass that loves a sailor." I have heard it sung occasionally by officers, but never by any one on the lower deck. It is to be found in most collections of old English songs; for instance, in Boosey's "Royal Edition of the Songs of England." The above two songs are supposed to illustrate the commissioning of the ship.

For the next event-preparing for sea-we are given “All in the downs" and "In Cawsand Bay lying." The former of these is never heard now in the Navy, and rarely on shore, though it must have been very popular at one time, if the old story

is correct about the parish clerk in the West Country who gave out the psalm in church one morning in the following fashion: "Let us zing to the prayse an' glory of God the hunderd an' vifth Psalm'When black-eyed Susan come aboard '-oh, drat it, an' vire, I'm wrong!" The song is given in Boosey's collection.

"In Cawsand Bay lying" was printed some time since in the Cornish Magazine, and I fancy I have come across it in print elsewhere, but it is so little known that I will give the words as I received them from a brother officer. They are said to have been written by a naval doctor, but for the truth of this I cannot vouch.

IN CAWSAND BAY LYING.

In Cawsand Bay lying, And a Blue Peter fly-ing, All

hands were turned up... the an-chor for to weigh. There