resome, lingering sickness floating away. Then
I was startled with a new sensation, I began to get hungry!

It was between four and five o'clock in the morning, and the "Balaklava"
did not breakfast until eight. Reader, were you ever hungry _at sea_?
Were you ever on deck, upon the measureless ocean, four hours earlier than
the ring of the breakfast-bell? Were you ever awake on the briny deep, in
advance, when the cook had yet two hours to sleep; when the stove in the
galley was cold, and the kindling-wood unsplit; the coffee still in its
tender, green, unroasted innocence? Were you ever upon "the blue, the
fresh, the ever free," under these circumstances? If so, I need not say to
_you_ that the sentiment, then and there awakened, is stronger than
avarice, pride, ambition or, love.

Presently Picton burst out like a flower on deck, in a mass of over-coats,
with an India-rubber mackintosh by way of calyx. These were his
night-clothes. Picton could do nothing except in full costume; he could
not fish, in ever so small a stream, without being booted to the hips; nor
shoot, in ever so good a cover, without being jacketed above the hips. He
shaved himself in front of a silver-mounted dressing-case, wrote his
letters on a portable secretary, drew off his boots with a patent
boot-jack, brewed his punch with a peripatetic kettle, and in fact carried
a little London with him in every quarter of the globe. "Well," said
Picton, looking around at the fog with a low and expressive whistle, "this
_is_ serene!"

Although Picton used the word "serene" ironically, just as a man riding in
an omnibus and suddenly discovering that he was destitute of the needful
sixpence might exclaim, "This is pleasant," yet the phrase was not out of
place. The "Balaklava" was gliding lazily over the water, at the rate of
three knots an hour, sometimes giving a little lurch by way of shaking the
wet out of her invisible sails, for the fog obscured all her upper canvas,
and the mind and body easily yielded to the lullaby movement of the
vessel. Talk of lotus-eating; of Castles of Indolence; of the dreamy ether
inhaled from amber-tubed narghile; of poppy and mandragora, and all the
drowsy syrups of the world; of rain upon the midnight roof; the cooing of
doves, the hush of falling snow, the murmur of brooks, the long summer
song of grasshoppers in the field, the tinkling of fountains, and
everything else that can soothe, lull, or tranquillize; and what are