swears a good deal, rum in his tea, speaking-
trumpet at his elbow, loblolly-boy (never knew
what that was!) at his beck and call, martinet,
disciplinarian, ready to put anybody in irons who
sneezes. I am astonished to find, seated at the
end of the table and busily engaged in preparing
tea, a tall gentleman of two or three and thirty,
wearing beard and moustache; of frank,
unassuming, mild manners, perfectly polished,
courteous, and well-bred; no cocked-hat, no
speaking-trumpet, no rum; plenty of conversation
on all kinds of subjects, political, social,
literary—everything but nautical; well up in
all questions and books of the day, seen strange
places and a close observer, speaks with great
fluency and in well-chosen terms. No belayings,
no timber-shiverings, no running over at the lee-
scuppers, nothing of the kind!

The passengers are supposed to have breakfasted
at their hotels before coming on board, so
the captain and I have the cabin to ourselves
until we are joined by the purser: by whom, also,
I am considerably astonished. According to the
authorities of naval fiction, my purser ought not to
be as he is, very much bronzed, very much bearded,
very blue-eyed and merry-faced, very much given
to comic stories and pleasant harmless satire;
but, if my recollection serves me right, ought to
be a hard, bilious, saturnine, not to say Scotch
gentleman, infallible in the matter of statistics,
a dead hand at accounts, a salt-water Cocker, or
a sea-going Joseph Hume.

After breakfast I go on deck to smoke
cigar. My friend, the purser, emerges from his
cabin and invites me to enter. This pleasant
retreat is about five feet square, and is so filled
by a bed, a camp-stool, a shelf, a flap-table, and
three or four gigantic ledgers, that there is
barely room for two persons to sit in it together.
When the door is shut, I lose sight of the
purser in the cloud of tobacco-smoke which
fills the place. He is companionable and jovial,
has been everywhere: on the China station, on
the Calcutta line, for a short time in a house
of business at Shanghai, is now going backwards
and forwards between Marseilles and Alexandria,
has no notion where he may be next month;
perhaps where he is, perhaps on a voyage to
Sydney. Such a life robs him of all interest
in the future, and makes him look at the
present but as a period to be got over in the
pleasantest manner possible; every ten days he
changes the entire set of people whom it is his
duty and his pleasure to serve and render
comfortable; and so long as the passengers have not to
complain of the accommodation of the Company,
nor the Company of the non-payment on the part
of the passengers, his mission in life is fulfilled
It is, indeed, a wonderful existence, looked at
in any light; but, to a man accustomed to hard
mental labour for ten hours out of the twenty-
four, it becomes pleasantly marvellous. You
have heard of the dolce far niente, of the
glorious, happy-to-day-let-to-morrow-take-care-of-
itself life of the couchant water-melon eating
passer-by-chaffing, nothing-doing Italian lazzarone,
but believe me it is nothing to the delicious

lassitude enjoyed by a man of business on his
first trip to the East. He has nothing to do,
and he does it thoroughly; his goods and
luggage are safely stowed away, he has a ticket for
them, and knows he will find them at the end of
his voyage; where also he knows he will find
his mercantile matters, his agency, his wife,
his judgeship, his Bogglywallah collector's
berth, his anything that he is going for; but
towards the realisation of which worrying himself
onboard will not help him one atom. Therefore,
if he be wise, he will not worry himself at all,
but will rise early and get an early turn in the
bath-house, will have a splendid appetite for
breakfast at nine, will smoke his cigar and
lounge about the deck until tiffin at twelve, will
smoke another cigar, lie down on the cabin
skylight under the pleasant awning, and perhaps
fall asleep, only giving himself time to wash his
hands before dinner at four; will form one of
the little smoking party seated on
campstools just out of the wind and under the lee
of the funnel, who allow the tea-bell at seven
o'clock to pass by without notice, and who do
not break up until a sharp tintinabulum at nine
proclaims that grog sparkles on the cabin board,
and that the purser's brandy and rum are ruby
bright.

When I describe a certain passenger on board,
by saying that his was the first laugh heard
every day; that no amount of bad weather,
or pitching and rolling, made him ill; that he
played the fiddle and the piano equally rapidly,
equally badly, and equally by ear; that he
would have played the kettle-drums, and the
Apollonicon, if we had had them on board;
that he never left the side of the prettiest lady
of our party whenever she appeared on deck,
but, without being the least obtrusive, was
always handy and attentive; that he told the
best stories of steeple-chasing at home and
tiger-hunting in India; and that every mortal
thing he did, whether he laughed, played the
fiddle or piano, strolled up and down the deck,
handed shawls and wraps, placed lounging-
chairs, or told apocryphal stories, was all done
as though his sole object, intent, and aim, were
to please this self-same prettiest lady—when I
have said all this, it is, I am sure, needless to
observe that the passenger was an Irishman.
Twenty years baking in Ceylon and Calcutta,
to which latter place he is returning after a
short visit at home, has not taken the national
spirit out of my friend of the Niger.

Who is this that cometh, in a long black robe
reaching to his heels, and fastened down the
middle with small purple buttons, and round the
waist with a purple cord and tassels, who beareth
a black silk skull-cap fitting tightly over his
crisp iron-grey hair, who is so fat of face, so
rotund of corporation, so thoroughly genial, not
to say jolly, in look, aspect, and demeanour?
This is a French Roman Catholic bishop,
Monseigneur l'Evêque de Biblos, in Cochin-
China, whither he is proceeding; and a kinder-
hearted, better, pleasanter man I will defy you
to produce. No matter what the state of the