It was the home at Belvedere, and its community of gallant old seamen who have served at least twenty years afloat, and are all over the of sixty, that I visited a few days eke. I noticed many of the ren wearing the ribbons of the Great War. Their average age, I was informed, is seventy-one: but at least two were born in 1845. One hearty veteran of ninety-two told me with gusto of his first going to sea in 1858 a sailing ship commanded by hi father for a voyage from the Channel Islands to the West Indies. An-¢ther, Michael Scully, aged sevent six, sailed over 1.500 miles to Rod-nez in an open boat after the foundering of the Trevessa in the South Indian Ocean in June, 1923. The voyage took twenty-two day: and the twenty occupants of the boat endured the most terrible hardships through exposure and lack of water. Two men, an Indian and an Arab, died on the way.
The house, once the residence of a former Lord Save and Sele, is an 014 country mansion standing on a bill in its own extensive and wooded park with a view of the Thames in the distance. Living in cubicles or dormitories, with ample smoking end recreation rooms, the men are completely clothed and fed, and provided with pocket-money and tobacco apart from sums earned for work in the house and grounds. A routine is necessarily laid down; but a very mild routine. Provided they are in by a certain time in the evening, they are free to come and go as they choose.
Many have no kith or kin. Some re ill and infirm. But all are well cared for. There is an atmosphere of reece and happiness about the Home, a feeling that the men prefer being Pmong their own kind to eking out a lonely existence elsewhere. Indeed, fley say so. They have nothing to Worry about. Their wants are supplied. They are passing the autumn. and winter of their lives in comfort fud without anxiety. The gales blustering among the trees outside. the fogs and snow, the rain beating 26 the windows, trouble them no longer. In clear, fine weather they like looking at the ships passing up ud down the river—ships very different to those in which most of them first went to sea.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.