opening the door is like lifting up
a trap-door in the floor; to deliberately start for some object, and,
before you know it, to be flung against it like a bag of sand; to
attempt to sit down on your sofa, and find you are sitting up; to slip
and slide and grasp at everything within reach, and to meet everybody
leaning and walking on a slant, as if a heavy wind were blowing, and the
laws of gravitation were reversed; to lie in your berth, and hear all
the dishes on the cabin-table go sousing off against the wall in a
general smash; to sit at table holding your soup-plate with one hand,
and watching for a chance to put your spoon in when it comes high tide
on your side of the dish; to vigilantly watch, the lurch of the heavy
dishes while holding your glass and your plate and your knife and fork,
and not to notice it when Brown, who sits next you, gets the whole swash
of the gravy from the roast-beef dish on his light-colored pantaloons,
and see the look of dismay that only Brown can assume on such an
occasion; to see Mrs. Brown advance to the table, suddenly stop and
hesitate, two waiters rush at her, with whom she struggles wildly,
only to go down in a heap with them in the opposite corner; to see her
partially recover, but only to shoot back again through her state-room
door, and be seen no more;--all this is quite pleasant and refreshing
if you are tired of land, but you get quite enough of it in a couple
of weeks. You become, in time, even a little tired of the Jew who goes
about wishing "he vas a veek older;" and the eccentric man, who looks
at no one, and streaks about the cabin and on deck, without any purpose,
and plays shuffle-board alone, always beating himself, and goes on the
deck occasionally through the sky-light instead of by the cabin
door, washes himself at the salt-water pump, and won't sleep in his
state-room, saying he is n't used to sleeping in a bed,--as if the hard
narrow, uneasy shelf of a berth was anything like a bed!--and you have
heard at last pretty nearly all about the officers, and their twenty
and thirty years of sea-life, and every ocean and port on the habitable
globe where they have been. There comes a day when you are quite ready
for land, and the scream of the "gull" is a welcome sound.

Even the sailors lose the vivacity of the first of the voyage. The first
two or three days we had their quaint and half-doleful singing in chorus
as they pulled at the ropes: now they are satisfied wit