[COPYRIGHTED]

U. S. NAVAL INSTITUTE, ANNAPOLIS, MD.

RECKLESS READINGS OF A NAVAL OFFICER

By CAPTAIN DAVID POTTER, Pay Corps, U. S. Navy

If to enjoy literature it is necessary to be master of critiques, then we are without privilege to speak of it. If real belles lettres are the only sort worthy of reminiscence, then read no farther here! If one who has not so much brooded with Melpomene as he has laughed with Thalia must be denied acquaintance with the Muses, then our claim to their friendship is small. As a naval officer we are one of a circle where things are more often done than they are read about-military men suffer from lack of exercise of their imaginative faculties. Nevertheless, some sort of bookishness must be conceded to us.

Since the story of Dick Whittington and his cat, in words of one syllable, hardly can be counted, "The Lady of the Lake" was the first bit of literature to be impressed upon our mind.

When the smallest of kilted boys we had the happiness to possess a bachelor uncle-the only man among the ten thousand inhabitants of the town bold enough to allow himself to be entered in the directory as "gentleman-of-leisure." He toiled not and neither did he spin; unless it be counted toil to work for the pleasure of others, or reckoned spinning to weave rainbows of fairy tales and verse for our gaping and adoring selves.

In a wilderness of a garden there was a cottage, and in that cottage there was a den," and in that "den" there was a rushbottomed chair with sawed-off legs. Installing us in the chair before him, the bachelor uncle would play: "Oh, Are You Sleepin', Maggie," or "Whistle, And I'll Come To You, My Lad," on his fiddle-the word violin" was anathema to him. And

his fiddling he would accompany by the sweetest whistling we have ever heard except from a song-thrush's bill.

We can understand now that such orchestration must have been by way of sly prelude for what was to follow-his own laughter, perhaps only half humorous, that a grown man should find nothing better to do than to amuse a child.

After the music, old green-bound volume in hand, although he knew whole cantos by heart, he would begin sonorously:

"The stag at eve had drunk his fill

Where danced the moon on Monan's rill,

And deep his midnight lair had made

In cool Glenartney's hazel shade.

But ere the sun his beacon red

Had kindled on Ben Voirlich's head,

The deep-mouthed bloodhound's heavy bay

Resounded up the rocky way... "

That moon, and that sun, and the twinkle in the bachelor uncle's blue eyes, all dance together in our heart.

At the school we attended, the masters were all British, counting one Nova Scotian as such. The headmaster, as it happened, was both a Cambrian and a Cantabrigian. By right of his native mountains he had a profound knowledge of the Bible, particularly of the Old Testament; and by right of his alma mater he had a very notable skill as a scansionist of the Roman poets. He could scan Virgil at sight-ability, we are informed, very rare even among Latin scholars. It was he who first put music for us, as well as meaning, into Dido's lament for the faithless Aeneas.

But our memory lingers more on the Scriptural side of the headmaster's talents. Every week he gave a lecture to the school on the Bible. Into this lecture no matter of religion, much less of dogma and doctrine, was allowed to enter, but only the literary and historical character of the great book.

Much of the New Testament and a little of the Old we had learned from others-the headmaster illumined for us Joshua and Judges and the Kings and the Samuels, and Isaiah and Ruth and Job.

The suggestion of mystery and infinite horror in the account of the Danites' terrible visit to Laish chilled our young marrow as we heard it:

"They came unto Laish, unto a people that were at quiet and secure: and they smote them with the edge of the sword, and burnt the city with fire. And there was no deliverer, because it was far from Zidon, and they had no business with any man."

The words "at quiet and secure " have a sinister significance for us to this day.

The story of the wise ladies of the mother of Sisera, who answered her as she cried through the lattice, put strange fancies in our head: "to every man a damsel or two." The essential spirit of the spoiler was in that cry-the same that fired the German lanzknechts in the sacking of Rome, that swept with it Tilly's devils at Magdeburg, that, more recently, whirled on with the same Teutonic fiends into Belgium.

Alfred Tennyson! A name not to conjure a male with between the ages of 20 and 60!-so far at least as his lyrics are concernedbut very powerful outside those ages.

It was a melody in "The Foresters," which we chanced to see very charmingly acted, that awakened our interest in Tennyson's poetry.

"There is no land like England

Where'er the light of day be;

There are no maids like the English maids,

So beautiful as they be.

And these shall wed with freemen,

And all their sons be free,

To sing the songs of England

Beneath the greenwood tree."

There was a time-we affirm it with little of exaggerationwhen we had half of Tennyson's lyrics at our tongue's end, and a great deal of his epical romances as well.

How we gloried in the plump headwaiter at the Cock to which we most resort! And the bitter barmaid, waning fast, was ordered to see that sheets were on our bed so often and so loudly that once the head of the household was compelled to remind us in ominous tones that every moment dies a man!

In those green-sickness days, how we used to invite the queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls to come into the garden where the black bat, Night, had flown! And how we hated with a real hatred the dreadful hollow behind the little wood! We fled with "Edwin Morris" when " there came a mystic token from the king." With him we despaired when

'They wedded her to sixty thousand pounds,

To lands in Kent and messuages in York,

And slight Sir Randolph with his watery smile
And educated whisker."

Do we undervalue Tennyson now? Perhaps. We do not forget "In Memoriam" or the "Idylls," or "Ulysses"; but we believe that to do one's right work in the world one's heart must have some alloy of hot metal, and Tennyson's poetry never put hot metal into any man's heart. Even "Ulysses" expresses only the resolution of broken men-there is iron there but the iron is cold.

The Nibelungenlied fell to us in college days. In the library of the old university, perched upon a ladder in the upper tier of the northern alcove, with Siegfried we seized Brunhilde and chastely stretched the sword between ourselves and her. The bookshelves about us were the great oaks of the Thuringian forests; and the meek heads of the librarians, seen through the grated floor of the tier, were those of the stark heroes of the epic, holding their God-doomed ways.

Here, too, Monsieur Guizot, in a dozen easy volumes, enamoured us of France. The history of that lovely land and its incomparable people-its sluggard kings, its Charleses, the Hammer and the Great, its Louis, the Good and the Bad and the Bald and the Fat and the Well-beloved-stirred us greatly. Its Jacquerie, its Armagnacs, its Leaguers, its Frondeurs, its Sans-culottes, its Vendeans, swam before us in a red mist. Between and over all, Agnes, Gabrielle, Diane, La Vallière, and all its other fair and pitiful ladies, made us wish that we too might have sighed at their feet.

In that same alcove of the old university library we re-read "Prince Otto," and read for the first time, "Will of the Mill" and "The Master of Ballantrae." To this day dreadful Otto is