awsing abowt in the Channel! Gentle reader, av you
ever been on the otion?--"The sea, the sea, the open sea!" as Barry
Cromwell says. As soon as we entered our little wessel, and I'd
looked to master's luggitch and mine (mine was rapt up in a very small
hankercher), as soon, I say, as we entered our little wessel, as soon
as I saw the waives, black and frothy, like fresh drawn porter, a-dashin
against the ribs of our galliant bark, the keal like a wedge, splittin
the billoes in two, the sales a-flaffin in the hair, the standard of
Hengland floating at the mask-head, the steward a-getting ready the
basins and things, the capting proudly tredding the deck and giving
orders to the salers, the white rox of Albany and the bathin-masheens
disappearing in the distans--then, then I felt, for the first time,
the mite, the madgisty of existence. "Yellowplush my boy," said I, in a
dialogue with myself, "your life is now about to commens--your carear,
as a man, dates from your entrans on board this packit. Be wise, be
manly, be cautious, forgit the follies of your youth. You are no longer
a boy now, but a FOOTMAN. Throw down your tops, your marbles, your
boyish games--throw off your childish habbits with your inky clerk's
jackit--throw up your--"

. . . . . .

Here, I recklect, I was obleeged to stopp. A fealin, in the fust place
singlar, in the next place painful, and at last compleatly overpowering,
had come upon me while I was making the abuff speach, and now I found
myself in a sityouation which Dellixy for Bids me to describe. Suffis to
say, that now I dixcovered what basins was made for--that for many, many
hours, I lay in a hagony of exostion, dead to all intense and porpuses,
the rain pattering in my face, the salers tramplink over my body--the
panes of purgatory going on inside. When we'd been about four hours in
this sityouation (it seam'd to me four ears), the steward comes to that
part of the deck where we servants were all huddled up together, and
calls out "Charles!"

"Well," says I, gurgling out a faint "yes, what's the matter?"

"You're wanted."

"Where?"

"Your master's wery ill," says he, with a grin.

"Master be hanged!" says I, turning round, more misrable than ever. I
woodn't have moved that day for twenty thousand masters--no, not for the
Empror of Russia or the Pop of Room.

Well, to cut this sad subjik short, many and many a voyitch have I sins
had upon what Shakspur calls