d us, and our own speed being taken off from the speed of the wind
there was scarcely air enough to fill our sails. The waves went down and
the ports were opened, and we had passed suddenly from winter into
perpetual summer, as Jean Paul says it will be with us in death. Sleep
came back soft and sweet, and the water was warm in our morning bath,
and the worries and annoyances of life vanished in these sweet
surroundings like nightmares when we wake. How well the Greeks
understood the spiritual beauty of the sea! [Greek: thalassa klyzei
panta tanthropon kaka], says Euripides. 'The sea washes off all the woes
of men.' The passengers lay about the decks in their chairs reading
story books. The young ones played Bull. The officers flirted mildly
with the pretty young ladies. For a brief interval care and anxiety had
spread their wings and flown away, and existence itself became
delightful.

There was a young scientific man on board who interested me much. He had
been sent out from Kew to take charge of the Botanical Gardens in
Jamaica--was quiet, modest, and unaffected, understood his own subjects
well, and could make others understand them; with him I had much
agreeable conversation. And there was another singular person who
attracted me even more. I took him at first for an American. He was a
Dane I found, an engineer by profession, and was on his way to some
South American republic. He was a long lean man with grey eyes, red
hair, and a laugh as if he so enjoyed the thing that amused him that he
wished to keep it all to himself, laughing inwardly till he choked and
shook with it. His chief amusement seemed to have lain in watching the
performances of Liberal politicians in various parts of the world. He
told me of an opposition leader in some parliament whom his rival in
office had disposed of by shutting him up in the caboose. 'In the
caboose,' he repeated, screaming with enjoyment at the thought of it,
and evidently wishing that all the parliamentary orators on the globe
were in the same place. In his wanderings he had been lately at the
Darien Canal, and gave me a wonderful account of the condition of things
there. The original estimate of the probable cost had been twenty-six
millions of our (English) money. All these millions had been spent
already, and only a fifth of the whole had as yet been executed. The
entire cost would not be less, under the existing management, than one
hundred millions, and he evidently dou