cks along the river and down the
Channel, I had never yet been sea-sick, smiling at Tim Rooney's
stereotyped inquiry each day of me, "An' sure, Misther Gray-ham, aren't
ye sorry yit ye came to say?"

Since the afternoon, however, when the water had become rougher and the
ship more lively, I had begun to experience a queer sensation such as I
recollect once having at home at Christmas-time--on which occasion Dr
Jollop, who was called in to attend me, declared I had eaten too much
plum-pudding, just in order to give me some of his nasty pills, of
course!

I hadn't had the chance of having anything so good as that now; but, at
tea-time Tom Jerrold, who, like myself, had made friends with Ching
Wang, had induced him to compound a savoury mess entitled, "dandy funk,"
composed of pounded biscuits, molasses, and grease. Of this mess, I am
sorry to say, I had partaken; and the probable source of my present
ailment was, no doubt, the insidious dandy funk wherewith Jerrold had
beguiled me.

Oh, that night!

Dandy funk or no, I could not soon forget it, for I never was so sick in
my life; and what is more, every roll of the ship made me worse, so that
I thought I should die--Tom Jerrold, the heartless wretch, who was
snoring away as usual in the next bunk to Weeks' below, not paying the
slightest attention to my feeble calls to him for help and assistance
between the paroxysms of my agonising qualms.

Somehow or other a sympathetic affinity seemed to be established between
the vessel and myself, I rolling as she rolled and heaving when she
heaved; while my heart seemed to reach from the Atlantic back to the
Channel, and I felt as if I had swallowed the ocean and was trying to
get rid of it and couldn't!

_Ille robur et aes triplex_, as Horace sang on again getting safely
ashore--for he must have been far too ill when afloat in his trireme--
and as father used to quote against me should I praise the charms of a
sailor's life, "framed of oak and fortified with triple brass" must have
been he who first braved the perils of the sea and made acquaintance
with that fell demon whom our French neighbours style more elegantly
than ourselves _le mal de mer_!

Weeks had his revenge upon me now with a vengeance indeed for all he
might have suffered from my pummelling of the previous day; yes, and for
the reproach of the two black eyes I had given him, which had since
altered their colouring to the tints of the sea and sky, they bein