66 as I Thursday. Still in the Alexandra | scraps of conversation. I remember at Dock. A sailor, who tells me no one South Kensington Station, only the is allowed ashore, looks up at the shrill other day, two men passing me with rigging and doesn't think the ranting, heavy, important tread while waiting snoring gale is anyway abated. I go for the train. "If I survive my wife," down to breakfast to the splendid says one to the other solemnly, gilded saloon (with an entirely unnec- hope I shall." Cætera desunt, for the essary lurching, sailor-like walk), and train came in. But what a glimpse find a type-written menu, a hand's into a household! length, crammed with every English All the early afternoon we get fairy and American delicacy. "Clam chow-views of the beautiful Welsh coast. der, corn cakes, buckwheat, hominy, Holyhead and its lighthouse look clear and cranberry jelly" make me feel as and sharp as in a water-color drawing. though Bartholdi's statue were already in sight. From my deck-chair I begin to notice the beginning of acquaintanceships and On deck the day is windy-brilliant. flirtations. One of the most obvious is The sky is Eton blue, and through the that of an elderly, golden-haired lady, haze the white gulls circle tempestu- with deep-set, twinkling eyes and the ously. The surface of the dock is highly artificial figure of a dressmaker's occasionally lashed into wreaths of mantle-hand, who walks the planks skurrying mist. Near me two business sharply with one of the travellers in men in yachting caps, to whom nothing yachting caps. He is the type of in the voyage or in nature are notice-"handsome swell" of a third-rate able, talk earnestly and gustily. I hear, "stall-fed cattle-went right down to the bank, sir, and got it if that had been all the money he had in the world, he couldn't 'a been tighter." away Now it's 11.30 by the dock clock, and we're gradually lurching from the Alexandra quay side. We pass the dock gates and out into the leaping river. Against the bright sunlight the houses and shore of New Brighton look black as a silhouette. The last I see of the Lancashire coast is the long dun sand-hills, patched with ragged grass blown into shapeless hummocks by the wind. Then, like sticks, the masts of a wreck. All round the hurricane deck tarpaulins are stretched; they flap-flap, flap! monotonously; they rumble with the dull thump of loosely stretched drums. As the Gigantic is still steady, passengers promenade briskly, and as they pass me in my deck-chair, I hear scraps of their conversation. A stout woman with a pinched waist, a brown ulster, and a cap pinned over her streaming hair, asks, 66 Has she any money at all?" Her companion, a wizened little man, dried up and brittle, in a shrunk covert coat, answers disagreeably, "Seventy pounds a year." Droll, these fleeting comic paper in its seaside summer number; he wears a serge suit, and, with his hands plunged in his jacket pockets and his sturdy, bourgeois legs planted briskly down one after the other, he regards his companion with that fatuous air of the irresistible who has had much success among barmaids. The husband of the golden-haired lady sits playing poker in the smoking-room, where the company looks like that of the commercial parlor of a Manchester hotel, and the atmosphere resembles a blue fog. As the Gigantic turns towards Queenstown the trembling and throbbing approach something more definite in the way of movement. I make up my mind to get shaved while I can. The barber, who is curled up asleep in his little shop, operates upon me deftly and informs me this is the one hundred and eighty-fifth time he has crossed the Atlantic. He charges a shilling for the shave, and says I shan't get done in New York for that money. Then he turns with a low bow to the most important man on board, our member of Parliament, who sits on the captain's right in the saloon. If the poor gentleman's well enough he will be called on to preside at the concert that always takes place the last night. like a drunken tramp under a hayIndeed, he has the air, as he strolls stack. about in his fur coat, of already con- At one in the morning I wake to absidering his neat and appropriate re- solute silence and stillness. We are at marks as chairman, or at least one of Queenstown. I discover Sam has been the many important social and polit-in and fastened a tin arrangement, ical problems of the day. Possibly, very like the tronc pour les pauvres however, I do him an injustice, and he outside a Catholic church, on to the is only wondering whether he is going edge of the berth. Très commode, ça. to be sick. At three I wake again and find we are Dinner is announced by a couple of leaving Queenstown. Sam, who looks sailor-boys marching about playing bu-in upon me, replies to my inquiries as to whether it isn't very rough, "Well, the wind's been here before us.' In gles. I find those bugles very trying in mid-Atlantic; they are tooted just outside my cabin door, and they seem Friday. Sam opens the portholes, to say: "Get up and come into the sa- and, leaning one fat hand on the edge loon, my boy. There you'll find meat of my berth, asks how I am. and rich sauces and puddings and a strangled voice I reply that I am wine." Even Sam, the steward, ad- wretched. His consolation is that he mits they sometimes have boots thrown will see me again presently. The buat them. At dinner I observe the mo-gles blow for breakfast; I hear the rose feeling growing stronger; my hair water going into the bath, loud voices, has a tendency to rise off my forehead, somebody who whistles the "Pinathe menu seems absurdly, outrageously, fore." The sea gushes into the glass disgustingly long. I am next rather a cap of the portholes and gushes out handsome girl who can't understand again; gushes in and gushes out. A why I don't talk to her. She asks me basket-work chair advances from the to pass the salt, and when I do it in other side of the cabin, meets a portdreary silence she says, "Thank you manteau, and retires. My toothbrush very much," and looks me straight in rattles in the glass, bottles fall. I doze. the eyes. The table steward bends over me with the menu and presses more food on me. His voice sounds muffled as though it came from a telephone. I rise with a frown, I sway gently from side to side, the joints in my legs don't feel sufficient to meet the upward and downward movements of the deck. The talk and the laughter, the rattle of knives and forks grow fainter. I find myself in a narrow passage with a brass rail on one side and a limp fire-hose on the other. I say aloud fretfully, "I want cabin 125." The bugles blow for lunch - for dinIn despair I open a door, any door; ner. The "Pinafore" whistler sings it's a bathroom. Fortunately I meet a the curate's song in the next cabin as boy carrying linen, from whom I de- he blithely dresses. The sea gushes mand Sam, my steward Sam. He says, and hisses in and out of the portholes ; "Sam is at plates, mister." That the curtains of my berth sway over my means Sam is assisting to wash-up. At face and brush it. I ring the electric last, cabin 125. The curtains, the bell for Sam to come and close the portcoats, my dressing-gown are swinging holes and shut out that horrible gushing from side to side. I throw my clothes sea. The boy comes in and says Sam off me as though they were all shirts of is at plates. I try to throw into my Nessus. I fall asleep, dully, heavily, glance an order to close the portholes. Sam comes in carrying a little basin of chicken broth and some crackers. He says it's half past eleven. I stare at him stupidly when he mentions crackers. I think of a Christmas party and my dear small nephews and nieces. But crackers are only pallid-looking biscuits, to escape from which I put my head under the clothes. Sam sighs and says he will see me again presently. Surely I told him to take away the chicken broth? I know I tried to. Doze. Far down under the bed-clothes a strange voice says "portholes." The boy looks at me alarmed and says, Sam will see me presently. In the middle of the night I wake with a baked, parched thirst. I ring the bell and a strange man enters in a dark flannel shirt. By my directions he gives me an effervescing drink. He makes it too strong and it fizzes over muy face and hair deliciously. He says it is two o'clock, and blowing pretty hard. I look at my watch and find it's twenty past three. That's the worst of going west; the nights are all the longer. I hear the sea boiling up into the portholes like a witch's cauldron. I slide from side to side in my berth and have to grip the edge to prevent myself from falling out. "Yes," says the strange man, "she's rolling." Saturday. As I follow the motion of the ship, I cannot help thinking of a country road that climbs and dips and falls, turns corners, rumbles and bumps over ruts and unmended spaces; stops for a minute or two to let the horsepower breathe and then dashes on again wildly, whip-bethwacked. I fancy myself in a shaky, weak old chaise; I am driving from Devizes to Marlborough over the downs; the road is very bad, there are huge stones and long raw places. As we sway and slide along, I build up beside our path Wiltshire farmhouses and villages. We stop for one trembling, suspended moment opposite a Cold Harbor I know. There is a damp-stained blue paper in the parlor, blue horsemen are leaping blue fences, some of them are cut in half by the corner china-closets. Outside a horn blows; it is that rackety young Pike with his tandem. Chalker, the farmer, enters to look at me, with his little eyes and long teeth. No, it's Sam, steadying himself with the door handle, and young Pike's horn is the bugle for breakfast. Sam has an orange stuck on a fork, the skin and the white all cut away, the juice dripping. "Dare I?" Sam opens the portholes and says, "It's a nasty morning again." The sea boils up into the portholes like milk into a saucepan. LIVING AGE. VOL. III. 107 I notice that the voices in the corridor and from the neighboring cabins are stronger, more cheerful. Sam says all his gentlemen are up with the exception of one next door, who spends the day making noises, each more complicated than the last. Sam says he wouldn't be so bad if he didn't think himself so well and eat so much. Why doesn't he imitate me? Yesterday I broke a biscuit in half. To-day I suck an orange. All day long I doze, doze confusedly. There are times in ocean voyages, I am sure, when these great ships strike and roll over marine monsters taking their ease near the surface. Often and often I felt the Gigantic strike something, struggle for a few moments with a body, vast and pulpy; either cut its way through it, or rise above and along it, and then go free again through the unresisting waves. Frequently I was sure I heard screams and dolorous cries of anguish. It was just as though we had run over some one in the street. Perhaps these vessels that are lost and never heard of again (the City of Boston, for instance, which they suppose destroyed by an iceberg) are in reality smashed and devoured by the revolt and combination of outraged furious monsters who have borne the mutilation and death of their dearest long enough. Sam visits me later in the interminable day with milk and lime water; to strengthen the stomach, he says. No use, my good Sam ; je ne puis pas le retenir. Steps, bugles, voices, the man who sings "Ta-ra-ra-boom de ay " while he gets ready for dinner, the man who comes down late from the smokingroom and undresses noisily. Sunday. Sam suggests I should see the doctor. The doctor comes rolling and lurching into my cabin after the half past ten Church of England service in the saloon. He, too, has had seventeen years of voyaging to and fro; it took him two months, he says, to get over his sea-sickness, so I can scarcely complain of my three days. He is an Irishman of the jovial type of Charles Lever's doctors, with a brogue one might cut with a silver knife. He | cides (they had one for each of their demands my tongue, and when, with first five voyages) and burials, not at an immense effort I show it to him, all uncommon. He winds up with an "Oi wish oi'd got wan so clane," says he regretfully. He orders me milk and lime water and a visit on deck, neither of which prescriptions I have the faintest idea of obeying. He tumbles out of my cabin like an amateur actor pretending to be extremely drunk, and I fall again to intermittent dozing. account of a commercial gentleman in the next cabin who had delirium tremens all last voyage, and required a strait waistcoat, Sam, and three supernumeraries to keep him quiet. I wake at six in the morning to find a strange man on his knees moving his hands mysteriously over the floor. He says he is scarching for my boots to clean them. He describes it as a nasty morning again aud bitterly cold. Monday afternoon. However Sam managed to get me up on deck, I don't know. To me it was like stumbling about inside a kaleidoscope, every object going through a constant shifting and wondrous sea-change. I have a recollection of his holding me by the arm and sliding me into a deck-chair. Now, he says, the deck-steward will see after me. When he leaves me I feel as though I have lost my only friend on board, and that I am about to shed the bitterest tears of my life. I open my eyes and see a sailor in a sou’ In the afternoon I am seized with a passionate desire to see the face of this restless, storm-lashed Atlantic. I begin by sitting up in my berth for the first time for three days. My head feels full of molten, swimming, clanging lead; my legs, on the other hand, as I dangle them impotently over the side of my berth, are as pieces of string. I fall on my knees, grown leaden now instead of my head (which feels light and bobbing as a cork), and with the help of the basket-work chair which slides to my aid, drag myself like a shot rabbit to the opposite berth below the portholes. How high above me it seems, aud now how low! Up I clamber and look out through the gush-wester dropping a thermometer overing, boiling porthole. Waves, green and curling hollows, slabs, terraces, troughs of water, broken and tumbling. White ridges and manes, and vast, deep pits where the sea appears clean Then comes to me the deck-steward. sliced into polished sides of the richest He produces the menu from his inside verd-antique. Not a ship, nor a bird;| jacket-pocket and holds it under my only the low grey sky, with its masses nose. I look at it blankly and drearily. of slowly shifting cloud; only the I see beef and mutton and things grandiose, breaking seas. Tempestu- fricasséed. Then I look at him and his ous as the seascape is, its very silence dumb, entreating eye. My white lips strikes me as ominous. It is like watching a man in a fit of dumb, inarticulate rage. It reminds me of seeing people dance, through a window, when you don't hear the music. board and pulling it up again to examine the temperature of the water, That is, I believe, to discover whether there be icebergs in the neighborhood. murmur something inarticulate; neither of us speaks, but, thank heaven, he understands me and goes. Healthy, hearty people walk sturdily up and down the deck, talking and In the evening Sam persuades me to laughing. I get hideous whiffs of their sit in the basket-work chair while he tobacco, and the end of my deck-chair makes my bed. I sit in a limp heap, is occasionally knocked in a way that like Irving in the last act of Louis XI. | moves me to blind fury. If I had a Sam entertains me, meanwhile, with gun handy, there are two young men stories of vessels which break their I should certainly shoot. They wear machinery when (just as we are) three Norfolk jackets and flannel trousers, days out; the rest of the voyage is they appear to enjoy the cold and the made laboriously under sail, and lasts motion, the wind envelops me with three weeks. Also he tells me of sui-occasional clouds of the horrible mix ture they are puffing at. I try to attract | sitting opposite in the luncheon car, the attention of the captain, who is the woman with her vivacious monwalking up and down with a pretty key face, cunning and shrewd, but girl, assuring her that he will get her not unpleasant; the man, handsome to New York on Thursday afternoon; I have an idea that he will put those two young men in irons if I ask him to, properly. aud sulky, with his common hands and thick legs. I set her down as a trapézienne, and he as the strong man who stands below steadying the rope, The deck is so bitterly cold that, to watching her gyrations with affected avoid being frozen and affecting the palpitations of terror. She read thermometer which the man in the "Belle-maman" when she was not sou'-wester pulls up and down and ex- quarrelling with him, and he had a amines carefully every half hour, I crumpled copy of "Gil Blas." And the drag myself miserably into the library. American ladies, in diamond earrings The library (owing perhaps to the and tight sealskin jackets, chattering quantity of light literature it contains) of the London shops and hotels while is even more unsteady than the deck. the pleasant English landscape slid I close my eyes and listen to two past, with the ploughing teams on the American girls chaff a fat young Dutch- brown uplands, the solitary figures man in a yachting cap and a reach- trudging along the roads, the broad me-down mackintosh with capes. 'He amuses them so much that they carry him off down to the saloon for after noon tea. I feel that if I don't speedily get below again I shall disgrace myself and my good friend Sam. I have a vision as I lurch along cabin-wards of leaping brass handrails and a long twining firehose, twisting like an empty snake. Fortunately, Sam is sitting in the passage amusing himself with a highly colored American comic paper. I fall shuddering into his arms; he undresses me like a child and puts me back into the familiar berth. He looks at me mournfully, and says he will see me again presently. Tuesday. Nothing but shipwreck will induce me to rise, and even then I shall insist on being the last person to leave the vessel. The doctor looks at me and says to Sam, "Fwhat shall we do to get um on deck? Shall we put powder under um ?" All day long I lie and read, not unpleasantly. I have" Half Hours of the best American Authors," which I took out of the library before we started, and Hardy's "Return of the Native," bought at Crewe. What years ago it seems since we left Loudon in the special, since I jumped out at Crewe and bought the book. How like a dream it seems to recall the two French people fields greenly shimmering with the winter wheat. And the wind in Liverpool, yelling through the docks, and the first sight of the Gigantic; and the sheaf of kindly telegrams waiting in the box in the saloon; and the steward, looking in his Eton jacket like a huge schoolboy, marking off our places for dinner and handing us each a number. How far off they all seem to me now tumbling in mid-Atlantic, how far off and yet how clear. Wednesday. As I stand looking at the sea, with a faint, wavering smile, a gentleman in a heavy ulster and a cap says cheerfully, :6 You've had a very bad time, haven't you?" He introduces himself as the man who suffered so much in the next cabin. His face is plaster-white and tightly drawn ; his eyebrows have gone up into his hair; his eyes are criss-crossed with a tangle of premature wrinkles. Really, if I looked like that, I should conceive it my duty to remain in my berth till I improved. As I haven't been shaved since last Thursday, I tumble below (I am rapidly getting my sea-legs now) with a sort of sham hearty Come aboard, sir!" air, down into the barber's shop. There I find our member of Parliament, who addresses me remarks of the courteous-foolish order. pears to be one of those gentlemen (not He ap |