next day everything was arranged. Elsie tried to protest, on
the foolish ground that she had no money: but the faculty had ordered
the apex of her right lung to go to Egypt, and I couldn't let her fly in
the face of the faculty. We secured our berths in a P. and O. steamer
from Brindisi; and within a week we were tossing upon the bosom of the
blue Mediterranean.

People who haven't crossed the blue Mediterranean cherish an absurd idea
that it is always calm and warm and sunny. I am sorry to take away any
sea's character; but I speak of it as I find it (to borrow a phrase from
my old gyp at Girton); and I am bound to admit that the Mediterranean
did not treat me as a lady expects to be treated. It behaved
disgracefully. People may rhapsodize as long as they choose about a life
on the ocean wave; for my own part, I wouldn't give a pin for
sea-sickness. We glided down the Adriatic from Brindisi to Corfu with a
reckless profusion of lateral motion which suggested the idea that the
ship must have been drinking.

I tried to rouse Elsie when we came abreast of the Ionian Islands, and
to remind her that 'Here was the home of Nausicaa in the Odyssey.' Elsie
failed to respond; she was otherwise occupied. At last, I succumbed and
gave it up. I remember nothing further till a day and a half later, when
we got under lee of Crete, and the ship showed a tendency to resume the
perpendicular. Then I began once more to take a languid interest in the
dinner question.

I may add parenthetically that the Mediterranean is a mere bit of a sea,
when you look at it on the map--a pocket sea, to be regarded with
mingled contempt and affection; but you learn to respect it when you
find that it takes four clear days and nights of abject misery merely to
run across its eastern basin from Brindisi to Alexandria. I respected
the Mediterranean immensely while we lay off the Peloponnesus in the
trough of the waves with a north wind blowing; I only began to temper my
respect with a distant liking when we passed under the welcome shelter
of Crete on a calm, star-lit evening.

It was deadly cold. We had not counted upon such weather in the sunny
south. I recollected now that the Greeks were wont to represent Boreas
as a chilly deity, and spoke of the Thracian breeze with the same
deferentially deprecating adjectives which we ourselves apply to the
east wind of our fatherland; but that apt classical memory somehow
failed to console or warm me. A good-n