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A history of ships through the ages.
Excerpt:- I beg to thank the Proprietor of the Pall Mall Magazine for his very kind permission to me to republish this volume of gossip about Ships. But the reader is under a very much greater obligation to him than this, because he has been good enough to allow the publishers to use the beautiful, and in many respects faultless, illustrations by my friend Mr. Seppings Wright. I am sure the reader will agree with me that some of these drawings are worthy the incomparable pencil of E. W. Cooke. My pages will not be accepted as a very learned and gravely important contribution to the literature of the Ship. They will be regarded as mere prattle, as we wander about the ship-building yard. We relate anecdotes; we crack our poor joke; we point to this and point to that; we tell what we know and what we believe to be the truth, and if we are wrong we apologise.