re.

[Illustration: Juvenile Scrubbers.]

_Saturday, November 4th_.--As fine as ever. This is certainly sailing
luxuriously, if not swiftly. We have now settled down into our regular
sea-ways, and have plenty to do on board; so the delay does not much
signify. Still, our time is limited, and we all hope to fall in with
the trades shortly to carry us to Tahiti or some of the South Sea
islands. We caught half-a-dozen of the little petrels, for stuffing,
by floating lines of black cotton astern, in which they became
entangled.

To-night's sunset was more superb than ever. Each moment produced a
new and ever increasingly grand effect. I mean to try and take an
instantaneous photograph of one. It would not, of course, reproduce
all the marvellous shades of colouring, but it would perhaps give some
idea of the forms of the masses of cloud, which are finer than any I
ever saw before. This ocean seems to give one, in a strange way, a
sense of solemn vastness, which was not produced to the same extent by
the Atlantic. Whether this results from our knowledge of its size, or
whether it is only fancy, I cannot say, but it is an impression which
we all share.

_Sunday, November 5th_.--Fine, and considerably hotter, though not
unpleasantly so. We had the Litany at eleven, and evening prayers and
a sermon at four o'clock. Not a single ship has passed within sight
since we left Valparaiso, and the only living creatures we have seen
are some albatrosses, a few white boobies, a cape-hen, the little
petrels already mentioned, a shoal of porpoises, and two whales.

_Monday, November 6th_.--Passed, at 3 a.m. to-day, a large barque,
steering south, and at 8 a.m. a full-rigged ship, steering the same
course. We held--as we do with every ship we pass--a short
conversation with her through the means of the mercantile code of
signals. (This habit of exchanging signals afterwards proved to have
been a most useful practice, for when the report that the 'Sunbeam'
had gone down with all hands was widely circulated through England, I
might almost say the world,--for we found the report had preceded us
by telegram to almost all the later ports we touched at,--the anxiety
of our friends was relieved many days sooner than it would otherwise
have been by the fact of our having spoken the German steamer
'Sakhara,' in the Magellan Straits, Oct. 13, four days after we were
supposed to have gone to the bottom.) The weather continues fine, and
we have