antonly endeavored to raise the
tender passions of my readers in this narrative, I should think myself
unpardonable if I concluded it without giving them the satisfaction of
hearing that the kitten at last recovered, to the great joy of the good
captain, but to the great disappointment of some of the sailors, who
asserted that the drowning a cat was the very surest way of raising a
favorable wind; a supposition of which, though we have heard several
plausible accounts, we will not presume to assign the true original
reason.

Friday, July 12.--This day our ladies went ashore at Ryde, and drank
their afternoon tea at an ale-house there with great satisfaction: here
they were regaled with fresh cream, to which they had been strangers
since they left the Downs.

Saturday, July 13.--The wind seeming likely to continue in the same
corner where it had been almost constantly for two months together, I
was persuaded by my wife to go ashore and stay at Ryde till we sailed.
I approved the motion much; for though I am a great lover of the sea,
I now fancied there was more pleasure in breathing the fresh air of the
land; but how to get thither was the question; for, being really that
dead luggage which I considered all passengers to be in the beginning
of this narrative, and incapable of any bodily motion without external
impulse, it was in vain to leave the ship, or to determine to do it,
without the assistance of others. In one instance, perhaps, the living,
luggage is more difficult to be moved or removed than an equal or much
superior weight of dead matter; which, if of the brittle kind, may
indeed be liable to be broken through negligence; but this, by proper
care, may be almost certainly prevented; whereas the fractures to which
the living lumps are exposed are sometimes by no caution avoidable, and
often by no art to be amended.

I was deliberating on the means of conveyance, not so much out of the
ship to the boat as out of a little tottering boat to the land; a matter
which, as I had already experienced in the Thames, was not extremely
easy, when to be performed by any other limbs than your own. Whilst I
weighed all that could suggest itself on this head, without strictly
examining the merit of the several schemes which were advanced by the
captain and sailors, and, indeed, giving no very deep attention even to
my wife, who, as well as her friend and my daughter, were exerting their
tender concern for my ease and safety,