of
March, one thousand eight hundred and fifty-one, and stood with a fair
wind out to sea.

It may be easily believed that up to that time I had had no leisure to be
intimate with my passengers. The most of them were then in their berths
sea-sick; however, in going among them, telling them what was good for
them, persuading them not to be there, but to come up on deck and feel
the breeze, and in rousing them with a joke, or a comfortable word, I
made acquaintance with them, perhaps, in a more friendly and confidential
way from the first, than I might have done at the cabin table.

Of my passengers, I need only particularise, just at present, a bright-
eyed blooming young wife who was going out to join her husband in
California, taking with her their only child, a little girl of three
years old, whom he had never seen; a sedate young woman in black, some
five years older (about thirty as I should say), who was going out to
join a brother; and an old gentleman, a good deal like a hawk if his eyes
had been better and not so red, who was always talking, morning, noon,
and night, about the gold discovery. But, whether he was making the
voyage, thinking his old arms could dig for gold, or whether his
speculation was to buy it, or to barter for it, or to cheat for it, or to
snatch it anyhow from other people, was his secret. He kept his secret.

These three and the child were the soonest well. The child was a most
engaging child, to be sure, and very fond of me: though I am bound to
admit that John Steadiman and I were borne on her pretty little books in
reverse order, and that he was captain there, and I was mate. It was
beautiful to watch her with John, and it was beautiful to watch John with
her. Few would have thought it possible, to see John playing at bo-peep
round the mast, that he was the man who had caught up an iron bar and
struck a Malay and a Maltese dead, as they were gliding with their knives
down the cabin stair aboard the barque Old England, when the captain lay
ill in his cot, off Saugar Point. But he was; and give him his back
against a bulwark, he would have done the same by half a dozen of them.
The name of the young mother was Mrs. Atherfield, the name of the young
lady in black was Miss Coleshaw, and the name of the old gentleman was
Mr. Rarx.

As the child had a quantity of shining fair hair, clustering in curls all
about her face, and as her name was Lucy, Steadiman gave her the name of
the