ere served to us by our
capable Chinese steward and cook. The doings and sayings of our
cabin boy would fill a book, but he was trustworthy and attended
faithfully to our wants. One night after I had retired, a heavy
thunder storm came up which might have caused us considerable
trouble had not our usual strict discipline been carried out. Having
become so used to confused sounds on deck I did not realize that the
ship had been struck by lightning, though I heard a sound which in
my dozing condition I laid to something falling down in the bathroom.
When the Captain came in to ask if I were all right I sleepily said,
"Why not? I think something has fallen down." He did not tell me
until morning that the ship had been struck and had caught fire aloft.
By changing the course the sparks were made to fall overboard while
men were sent aloft to cut away the blazing fragments. About ten
minutes before the vessel was struck, a dozen men were aloft furling
a sail just where the lightning struck us, and when the storm was
over it seemed a special act of Providence that we still had these
men with us.

I have so often been asked what could we possibly have to eat that
would be appetizing for such lengthy voyages. We always carried fowl
in large numbers and it was very seldom that we did not have fresh
eggs enough for our table during the voyage. Potatoes, onions, and
lemons we always had in abundance and they were very important items
of our food. The following is one of the menus served to us on quite
a stormy day as we were running across the Indian Ocean. For
breakfast: baked beans, fish balls, brown bread, hot biscuits, tea
and coffee. For dinner: soup, roast chicken, cold tongue, boiled
potatoes, squash, and onions, English pudding, hard sauce, and coffee.
For supper: warm biscuit, cold chicken, cold tongue, fried potatoes,
cake and tea. In fine weather our menus were more elaborate and I
never knew any one to complain of being hungry aboard ship while I
was going to sea.

After eighty-seven days of such sea life I was aroused one morning
to go on deck and see if I could see anything that looked like land
and saw what at first seemed to me to be a small cloud in the
distance about thirty miles away. As the morning wore on, the
Australian coast gradually loomed up before us, the land first seen
proving to be Cape Bridgewater. We sighted Cape Otway in the
afternoon, the lighthouse being plainly seen in the evening, and
suc