high seas, when your appetite was
made to depend on the aspect of the weather. Did the wind blow fresh and
fair, you eat away with a careless ease and a happy conscience, highly
beneficial to your digestion. With a glance through the skylight at
the blue heaven, with a sly look at the prosperous dog-vane, you helped
yourself to the liver wing, and took an extra glass of your sherry.
Let the breeze fall, however, let a calm come on, or, worse still,
a trampling noise on deck, and a certain rickety motion of the craft
betoken a change of wind, the knife and fork fell listlessly from your
hand, the unlifted cutlet was consigned to your plate, the very spoonful
of gravy you had devoured in imagination was dropped upon the dish, and
you replaced the cork in your bottle, with the sad sigh of a man who
felt that, instead of his income, he has been living on the principal of
his fortune.

Happily, there is a reverse to the medal, and this it was to which now
my attention was directed. The trip as occasionally happened, was a
rapid one; and while under the miserable impression that a fourth part
of the journey had not been accomplished, we were blessed with the
tidings of land. Scarcely was the word uttered, when it flew from mouth
to mouth; and I thought I could trace the elated look of proud and happy
hearts, as home drew near. What was my surprise, however, to see the
enthusiasm take another and very different channel. With one accord a
general rush was made upon the hampers of prog. Baskets were burst open
on every side. Sandwiches and sausages, porter bottles, cold punch,
chickens, and hard eggs, were strewn about with a careless and reckless
profusion; none semed too sick or too sore for this general epidemic
of feasting. Old gentlemen sat up in their beds and bawled for beef;
children of tender years brandished a drumstick. Individuals who but a
short half-hour before seemed to have made a hearty meal, testified by
the ravenous exploits of their appetites to their former forbearance and
abstemiousness. Even the cautious little man in the brown spencer, who
wrapped up the remnant of his breakfast in the _Times_, now opened his
whole store, and seemed bent upon a day of rejoicing. Never was such a
scene of riotous noise and tumultuous mirth. Those who scowled at each
other till now, hob-nobbed across the table; and simpering old maids
cracked merry thoughts with gay bachelors, without even a passing fear
for the result. "Th