Passing Quarantine Hulk. The infallible has done the
business for all the party except the Scotchman's wife and the
author of that formidable remedy.

Nearing the Light-Ship. Exit the Scotchman's wife, head drooped on
stewardess's shoulder.

Entering the open sea. Exit doctor!

The rout seems permanent; hence the smallness of the company at table
since the voyage began. Our captain is a grave, handsome Hercules of
thirty-five, with a brown hand of such majestic size that one cannot eat
for admiring it and wondering if a single kid or calf could furnish
material for gloving it.

Conversation not general; drones along between couples. One catches a
sentence here and there. Like this, from Bermudian of thirteen years'
absence: "It is the nature of women to ask trivial, irrelevant, and
pursuing questions--questions that pursue you from a beginning in nothing
to a run-to-cover in nowhere." Reply of Bermudian of twenty-seven years'
absence: "Yes; and to think they have logical, analytical minds and
argumentative ability. You see 'em begin to whet up whenever they smell
argument in the air." Plainly these be philosophers.

Twice since we left port our engines have stopped for a couple of minutes
at a time. Now they stop again. Says the pale young man, meditatively,
"There!--that engineer is sitting down to rest again."

Grave stare from the captain, whose mighty jaws cease to work, and whose
harpooned potato stops in midair on its way to his open, paralyzed mouth.
Presently he says in measured tones, "Is it your idea that the engineer
of this ship propels her by a crank turned by his own hands?"

The pale young man studies over this a moment, then lifts up his
guileless eyes, and says, "Don't he?"

Thus gently falls the death-blow to further conversation, and the dinner
drags to its close in a reflective silence, disturbed by no sounds but
the murmurous wash of the sea and the subdued clash of teeth.

After a smoke and a promenade on deck, where is no motion to discompose
our steps, we think of a game of whist. We ask the brisk and capable
stewardess from Ireland if there are any cards in the ship.

"Bless your soul, dear, indeed there is. Not a whole pack, true for ye,
but not enough missing to signify."

However, I happened by accident to bethink me of a new pack in a morocco
case, in my trunk, which I had placed there by mistake, thinking it to be
a flask of something. So