ming when to button a cuff or arrange a ruff will be a matter of
absolute despair. You lie disconsolate in your berth, only desiring to
be let alone to die; and then, if you are told, as you always are, that
"you mustn't give way," that "you must rouse yourself" and come on deck,
you will appreciate the value of simple attire. With every thing in your
berth dizzily swinging backwards and forwards, your bonnet, your cloak,
your tippet, your gloves, all present so many discouraging
impossibilities; knotted strings cannot be untied, and modes of
fastening which seemed curious and convenient, when you had nothing else
to do but fasten them, now look disgustingly impracticable.
Nevertheless, your fate for the whole voyage depends upon your rousing
yourself to get upon deck at first; to give up, then, is to be condemned
to the Avernus, the Hades of the lower regions, for the rest of the
voyage.

Ah, _those_ lower regions!--the saloons--every couch and corner filled
with prostrate, despairing forms, with pale cheeks, long, willowy hair
and sunken eyes, groaning, sighing, and apostrophizing the Fates, and
solemnly vowing between every lurch of the ship, that "you'll never
catch them going to sea again, that's what you won't;" and then the
bulletins from all the state rooms--"Mrs. A. is sick, and Miss B.
sicker, and Miss C. almost dead, and Mrs. E., F., and G. declare that
they shall give up." This threat of "giving up" is a standing resort of
ladies in distressed circumstances; it is always very impressively
pronounced, as if the result of earnest purpose; but how it is to be
carried out practically, how ladies _do_ give up, and what general
impression is made on creation when they do, has never yet appeared.
Certainly the sea seems to care very little about the threat, for he
goes on lurching all hands about just as freely afterwards as before.

There are always some three or four in a hundred who escape all these
evils. They are not sick, and they seem to be having a good time
generally, and always meet you with "What a charming run we are having!
Isn't it delightful?" and so on. If you have a turn for being
disinterested, you can console your miseries by a view of their
joyousness. Three or four of our ladies were of this happy order, and it
was really refreshing to see them.

For my part, I was less fortunate. I could not and would not give up and
become one of the ghosts below, and so I managed, by keeping on deck and
t