ot cease.

The wind was, of course, right abeam; the sea soon ran very high.
The Neva, being a long screw, was lively enough, and too lively; for
she soon showed a chronic inclination to roll, and that suddenly, by
fits and starts. The fiddles were on the tables for nearly a week:
but they did not prevent more than one of us finding his dinner
suddenly in his lap instead of his stomach. However, no one was
hurt, nor even frightened: save two poor ladies--not from Trinidad-
-who spent their doleful days and nights in screaming, telling their
beads, drinking weak brandy-and-water, and informing the hunted
stewardess that if they had known what horrors they were about to
endure, they would have gone to Europe in--a sailing vessel. The
foreigners--who are usually, I know not why, bad sailors--soon
vanished to their berths: so did the ladies: even those who were
not ill jammed themselves into their berths, and lay there, for fear
of falls and bruises; while the Englishmen and a coloured man or
two--the coloured men usually stand the sea well--had the deck all
to themselves; and slopped about, holding on, and longing for a
monkey's tail; but on the whole rather liking it.

For, after all, it is a glorious pastime to find oneself in a real
gale of wind, in a big ship, with not a rock to run against within a
thousand miles. One seems in such danger; and one is so safe. And
gradually the sense of security grows, and grows into a sense of
victory, as with the boy who fears his first fence, plucks up heart
for the second, is rather pleased at the third, and craves for the
triumph of the fourth and of all the rest, sorry at last when the
run is over. And when a man--not being sea-sick--has once
discovered that the apparent heel of the ship in rolling is at least
four times less than it looks, and that she will jump upright again
in a quarter of a minute like a fisher's float; has learnt to get
his trunk out from under his berth, and put it back again, by
jamming his forehead against the berth-side and his heels against
the ship's wall; has learnt--if he sleep aft--to sleep through the
firing of the screw, though it does shake all the marrow in his
backbone; and has, above all, made a solemn vow to shave and bathe
every morning, let the ship be as lively as she will: then he will
find a full gale a finer tonic, and a finer stirrer of wholesome
appetite, than all the drugs of Apothecari