hour after hour watching
him, and it is evident that he performs all his duties in this frame of
sad composure. Now I see him resignedly stuffing a turkey, anon
compounding a sauce, or mournfully making little ripples in the crust of
a tart; but all is done under an evident sense that it is of no use
trying.

Many complaints have been made of our coffee since we have been on
board, which, to say the truth, has been as unsettled as most of the
social questions of our day, and, perhaps, for that reason quite as
generally unpalatable; but since I have seen our cook, I am quite
persuaded that the coffee, like other works of great artists, has
borrowed the hues of its maker's mind. I think I hear him soliloquize
over it--"To what purpose is coffee?--of what avail tea?--thick or
clear?--all is passing away--a little egg, or fish skin, more or less,
what are they?" and so we get melancholy coffee and tea, owing to our
philosophic cook.

After dinner I watch him as he washes dishes: he hangs up a whole row of
tin; the ship gives a lurch, and knocks them all down. He looks as if it
was just what he expected. "Such is life!" he says, as he pursues a
frisky tin pan in one direction, and arrests the gambols of the ladle in
another; while the wicked sea, meanwhile, with another lurch, is
upsetting all his dishwater. I can see how these daily trials, this
performing of most delicate and complicated gastronomic operations in
the midst of such unsteady, unsettled circumstances, have gradually
given this poor soul a despair of living, and brought him into this
state of philosophic melancholy. Just as Xantippe made a sage of
Socrates, this whisky, frisky, stormy ship life has made a sage of our
cook. Meanwhile, not to do him injustice, let it be recorded, that in
all dishes which require grave conviction and steady perseverance,
rather than hope and inspiration, he is eminently successful. Our table
excels in viands of a reflective and solemn character; mighty rounds of
beef, vast saddles of mutton, and the whole tribe of meats in general,
come on in a superior style. English plum pudding, a weighty and serious
performance, is exhibited in first-rate order. The jellies want
lightness,--but that is to be expected.

I admire the thorough order and system with which every thing is done on
these ships. One day, when the servants came round, as they do at a
certain time after dinner, and screwed up the shelf of decanters and
bottles out