as a paint box.

But how dull this log-writing becomes! How on earth can I find an
incident to pad up this journal; what is there to write about in a route
so monotonously first class! Here is absolutely the most risque exciting
story I have heard for days; I must say the lady who told it has such an
infectious laugh, that at the time I really thought it was very amusing.

You know the cabins on the P. & O. steamers are all exactly like each
other, except the number above each door. So once upon a time she
related, a certain lady tripped along to her cabin as she thought, to
hurry up her husband for dinner and found him pulling on a shirt; she
plumped into a seat, saying, "John, John, you are always too late for
dinner, and there's no use trying to struggle into your shirt with the
studs fastened?" Whereon the neck stud flew and revealed an astonished
face--and it was not "John's." After lunch I told this to my barrister
acquaintance; he smiled gently and said he had always thought it such an
amusing story.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

How I wish I was back at sea again on a whaler, with a swinging hammock,
a tow net, and microscope, and opportunities any day to study the fairy
beauties in drops of sea water, and with human interest too, so much
more varied than on this P. & O. Hotel; there, would be all kinds of
men, jolly, devil-may-care fellows, and even disreputable characters,
mixed with canny, pawky, canting Scotties, and talk of all the corners
of the world; ranting rollicking Balzacian yarns, rich in language, in
poetry, and tenderness; any minute in the day amongst such people you
might strike a yarn that would bear publication; the picturesque
interest of life does not seem to be on the high plains, or low levels,
but as it were between wind and water, where plain meets mountain, the
poor the rich, between happiness and sorrow, and light and shade; and
the fun of painting between one colour and the next. It is all very
respectably drab here, and we talk of intellectual and proper things.
For an hour to-day--no, two hours I am sure--I laboured at Indian
sociology and history and Vedas and things, with the barrister, and I
was tired! The barrister knows many books on these subjects, and
recommends me to read Sir W. W. Hunter's "History of India" in its
abridged form of only 700 pages; I suppose I must!--told my cousin I'd
been trying to talk Indian sociology and he s