t a very considerable one, and the few plums in it
I fear are almost wide enough apart to be out of hail of one another.
However a sample or two will suffice to enable me to keep my word and
to write something at all events autobiographic.

So let us start off Cape Horn on a July day in the year of grace 1859.
The ship was a fine old Australian liner, a vessel of hard upon 1400
tons, a burden that in those days constituted a large craft. She was
commanded by one Captain Neatby, something of a favourite I believe in
the passenger trade--a careful old man with bow-legs and a fiery
grog-blossom of a nose. He wore a tall chimney-pot hat in all weathers,
and was reckoned a very careful man because he always furled his fore
and mizzen royals in the first dog-watch every night. We were a long
way south; I cannot remember the exact latitude, but I know it was
drawing close upon sixty degrees. There was a talk in the midshipmen's
berth amongst us that the captain was trying his hand at the great
Circle course, but none of us knew much about it down in that gloomy,
'tween-decks, slush-flavoured cavern in which we youngsters lived. I
was fourteen years old, homeward bound on my first voyage; a little
bit of a midshipman, burnt dry by Pacific suns, with a mortal hatred
and terror of the wild, inexpressibly bitter cold of the roaring
ice-loaded parallels in whose Antarctic twilight our noble ship was
plunging and rolling now under a fragment of maintopsail, now under a
reefed foresail and double-reefed foretopsail, chased by the shrieking
western gale that flew like volleys of scissors and thumbscrews over
our taffrail, and by seas, whose glittering, flickering peaks one
looked up at from the neighbourhood of the wheel as at the brows of
tall and beetling cliffs. The gale was white with snow, and dark with
the blinding fall of it too, when I came on deck at noon. I was in the
chief mate's, or port watch, as it is called. The ship was running
under a double-reefed topsail--in those days we carried single
sails,--reefed foresail, close-reefed foretopsail, and maintopmast
staysail. The snow made a London fog of the atmosphere; forward of the
galley the ship was out of sight at times when it came thundering down
out of the blackness aft, white as any smother of spume. She pitched
with the majesty of a line-of-battle ship, as she launched herself in
long floating rushes from gleaming pinnacle to seething valley with a
heavy, melancholy s