hip on Tuesday, and as it steamed away from the
landing-stage he gazed after it regretfully.

"There she goes," he said, "there she goes, with two pounds' worth of
food on board that belongs to me, and that I haven't had."

He said that if they had given him another day he thought he could have
put it straight.

So I set my face against the sea trip. Not, as I explained, upon my own
account. I was never queer. But I was afraid for George. George said
he should be all right, and would rather like it, but he would advise
Harris and me not to think of it, as he felt sure we should both be ill.
Harris said that, to himself, it was always a mystery how people managed
to get sick at sea--said he thought people must do it on purpose, from
affectation--said he had often wished to be, but had never been able.

Then he told us anecdotes of how he had gone across the Channel when it
was so rough that the passengers had to be tied into their berths, and he
and the captain were the only two living souls on board who were not ill.
Sometimes it was he and the second mate who were not ill; but it was
generally he and one other man. If not he and another man, then it was
he by himself.

It is a curious fact, but nobody ever is sea-sick--on land. At sea, you
come across plenty of people very bad indeed, whole boat-loads of them;
but I never met a man yet, on land, who had ever known at all what it was
to be sea-sick. Where the thousands upon thousands of bad sailors that
swarm in every ship hide themselves when they are on land is a mystery.

If most men were like a fellow I saw on the Yarmouth boat one day, I
could account for the seeming enigma easily enough. It was just off
Southend Pier, I recollect, and he was leaning out through one of the
port-holes in a very dangerous position. I went up to him to try and
save him.

"Hi! come further in," I said, shaking him by the shoulder. "You'll be
overboard."

"Oh my! I wish I was," was the only answer I could get; and there I had
to leave him.

Three weeks afterwards, I met him in the coffee-room of a Bath hotel,
talking about his voyages, and explaining, with enthusiasm, how he loved
the sea.

"Good sailor!" he replied in answer to a mild young man's envious query;
"well, I did feel a little queer _once_, I confess. It was off Cape
Horn. The vessel was wrecked the next morning."

I said:

"Weren't you a little shaky by Southend Pier one day, and wanted to be
thr