ship,
highly esteemed by the passengers, and as nearly beloved by the crew as
one of the afterguard can ever reasonably hope to be. The skipper, in
particular, took the loss of this very promising officer deeply to
heart, not only because of the esteem in which he held him, but also, I
fancy, because he was worried by the conviction that the accident was
very largely due to his own propensity to "carry on" rather too
recklessly.

On the ninth day after this unfortunate occurrence, and on our thirty-
ninth day out from London, we found ourselves in the longitude of the
Cape of Good Hope, and in latitude 37 degrees 20 minutes south, with a
whole gale of wind chasing us, which blew us into latitude 39 degrees
south, and longitude 60 degrees east before it left us, ten days later,
stark becalmed. The calm, however, lasted but a few hours, and was
succeeded by a light northerly breeze, under the impulse of which, with
all plain sail set, the _Salamis_ could barely log six knots to the
hour. This lasted all night, and all the next day; but before that day
had sped, the second incident occurred, that resulted in plumping me
into the adventure which is the subject of this yarn.

The heavy sea which had been kicked up by the gale subsided with
extraordinary rapidity, and when I went on duty at eight bells (eight
o'clock) on this particular morning the weather was everything that the
most fastidious person could possibly desire, saving that the sun struck
along the weather side of the deck--when he squinted at us past the
weather leach of the mainsail as the ship rolled gently to the heave of
the swell--with a fierceness that threatened a roasting hot day, what
time he should have worked his way a point or two farther round to the
nor'ard. The swell which lingered, to remind us of the recent breeze,
was subsiding fast, and the ocean presented one vast surface of long,
solemn-sweeping undulations of the deepest, purest sapphire, gently
ruffled by the breathing of the languid breeze, and ablaze in the wake
of the sun with a dazzle that brought tears to the eye that attempted to
gaze upon it. The ship's morning toilet had been completed, and the
decks, darkened by the sluicing to which they had been lavishly
subjected by the acting second mate and his watch, were drying fast and
recovering their sand-white colour in the process. The brasswork,
freshly scoured and polished, and the glass of the skylights, shot out a
thousand