eating, drinking, and sleeping, may at first contribute not a little to the discomfiture of old Time, who walks the sea shod with leaden sandals. The last three enumerated items, however, generally hold out to the last undisabled. But three Wellingtons could not have won Waterloo unsupported; nor, able and doughty as are these bold three—much as they prolong the combat—manfully as they fight, can they hold good their ground for ever; the obstinate, scythe-armed warrior, with his twenty-four body guards following him like his shadow, will still maintain the broadest portion of his diurnal territory, over which, manœuvre as they may, these discomfited worthies cannot extend their front.

Few situations are less enviable, than that of the worn voyager, as day after day "drags its slow length along," presenting to his restless, listless eyes, as he stretches them wearily over the leaden waste around him—the same unbroken horizon, forming the periphery of a circle, of which his vessel seems to be the immovable and everlasting centre—the same blue, unmeaning skies above—the same blue sea beneath and around—the same gigantic tracery of ropes and spars, whose fortuitous combinations of strange geometrical figures he has demonstrated, till they are as familiar as the diagrams on a turtle's back to an alderman; and the same dull white sails, with whose patches he has become as familiar as with the excrescences and other innocent defects upon the visages of his fellow-sufferers.

On leaving port, I commenced a journal, or rather, as I am in a nautical atmosphere, a "log," the choicest chips of which shall be hewn off, basketed in fools-cap, and duly transmitted to you. Like other chips they may be useful to kindle the fire withal. "What may not warm the feelings may—the toes," is a truism of which you need not be reminded: and if you test it practically, it will not be the first time good has been elicited from evil. But the sameness of a sea-life will by no means afford me many combustible incidents. Somebody has said "the will is equal to the deed, if the deed cannot be." Now I have the will to pile a hecatomb, but if I can pile only a couple of straws, it will be, of course, the same thing in the abstract. Mine, perchance, may be the fate of that poor journalist who, in a voyage across the Atlantic, could obtain but one wretched item wherewith to fill his journal—which he should have published, by the way. What a rare sort of a book it would have been! So soon read too! In this age when type-blotted books are generative, it would immortalize the author. Tenderly handed down from one generation to another, it would survive the "fall of empires, and the crash of worlds." "At three and a quarter P. M., ship going two and a half knots per hour, the cook lost his bucket over-board—jolly boat lowered, and Jack and Peter rowed after it."

"Half-past three, P. M.—Cook has got his bucket again—and a broken head into the bargain."

To one who has never "played with Ocean's mane," nor, borne by his white-winged coursers, scoured his pathless fields, there may be, even in the common-place descriptions of sea-scenes, something, which wears the charm of novelty. If my hasty sketches can contribute to your entertainment "o' winter nights," or, to the gratification of your curiosity, they will possess an influence which I do not promise or predict for them.

Unfavourable winds had detained our ship several days, and all who had taken passage were on the "tiptoe of expectation" for the signal for sailing. Trunks, boxes, chests, cases, carpet-bags, and all the paraphernalia of travelling equipage, had long been packed, locked, and shipped—and our eyes had hourly watched the fickle gyrations of a horizontal gilt figure, which surmounted the spire of a neighbouring church, till they ached again. Had the image been Eolus himself, it could not have commanded more devoted worshippers.

A week elapsed—and patience, which hitherto had been admirably sustained, began to flag; murmurings proceeded from the lips of more than one of the impatient passengers, as by twos and threes, they would meet by a kind of sympathetic affinity at the corners of the streets, where an unobstructed view could be obtained of some church-vane, all of which, throughout our city of churches, had taken a most unaccommodating fancy to kick their golden-shod heels at the Northern Bear.

At precisely twenty minutes before three of the clock, on the afternoon of the first of November instant, the phlegmatic personage in the gilt robe, very obligingly, after he had worn our patience to shreds by his obstinacy, let his head and heels exchange places. At the same moment, ere he had ceased vibrating and settled himself steadily in his new position, the welcome signal was made, and in less than half an hour afterward, we were all, with bag and baggage, on board the ship, which rode at her anchor two hundred fathoms from the shore.

The top-sails, already loosed, were bellying and wildly collapsing with a loud noise, in the wind; but bounding to their posts at the command of their superior officer, the active seamen soon extended them upon the spars—immense fields of swelling canvass; and our vessel gracefully moved from her moorings, and glided through the water with the lightness of a swan.

As we moved rapidly down the noble harbour, which, half a century since, bore upon its bosom the hostile fleet of the proud island of the north, the swelling ocean was sending in its evening tribute to the continent, in vast scrolls, which rolled silently, but irresistibly onward, and majestically unfolded upon the beach—or, with a hoarse roar, resounded along the cliffs, and surged among the rocky throats of the promontory, impressing the mind with emotions of sublimity and awe.

II.

The motion was just sufficiently lively to inspirit one—making the blood frolic through the veins, and the heart beat more proudly. The old tars, as they cruised about the decks, walked as steadily as on land. This proves nothing, you may say, if you have witnessed Jack's pendulating, uncertain—"right and left oblique" advance on a shore cruise.

Our tyros of the sea, in their venturesome projections of their persons from one given point in their eye to another, in the hope of accomplishing a straight line, after vacillating most appallingly, would finally succeed "haud passibus æquis" in reaching the position aimed for, fortunate if a lee-lurch did not accommodate them with a dry bed in the "lee scuppers."

Of all laughter-exciting locomotives which most create sensations of the ludicrously serious, commend me to an old land-crab teaching its young one to "go ahead"—a drunkard, reeling homeward through a broad street on a Saturday night—and a "gentleman passenger" three days at sea in his strange evolutions over the deck.

Stretched before me upon the weather hen-coop, enveloped in his cloak, lay one of our "goodlie companie." If his sensations were such as I imagined them to be, he must have felt that the simplest chicken under him wore the stoutest heart.

On the lee hen-coop reposed another passenger in sympathy with his fellow, to whose feelings I felt a disposition to do equal justice. Abaft the wheel, coiled up in the rigging, an agreeable substitute for a bed of down, lay half obscured within the shadow of the lofty stern,