one. A ship hove in sight,
too, and we thought she had just the name for our calm sailing, the
"All-Serene." She was an English ship, from Sydney, Australia, and had
been sixty days out. She wanted fresh provisions and flour; so our
captain gave her potatoes, bananas, and turkeys. Being so much becalmed
ourselves, our captain did not dare to give them flour, as we might come
short, and they had plenty of hard bread. It quite revived our courage,
for what were our nine days compared with their sixty days? And we had
plenty of provisions and good company.

We saw a great many flying-fish every day. These are small, and have
their forward fins so long that they serve them as wings skimming along
on the surface of the water. They looked very silvery in the sunlight,
and I thought at first they were little white birds.

Several times we saw porpoises, and one day a shoal of whales was in
sight. One big black fellow leaped out of the water; we first saw his
great head, then his fluked tail thrown up in the air, as he dived down
to depths beneath. Some of them were spouting and playing about us, and
one had a young whale with her.

A large shoal of "skip jacks" surrounded the ship one morning; there
must have been thousands of them!

"What are _skip jacks_?" asked Willie.

A pretty blue fish between one and two feet long; they were mostly blue,
but seemed to change to all colors of the rainbow. The men fished for
them with a hook covered with a rag, which the fish were supposed to
imagine a flying-fish, and ten of them were silly enough to be deceived;
so we had a chowder of fresh fish.

The captain had the galley or cook-room cleared up for us one afternoon,
and we boiled sugar for candy. He did everything possible for our
comfort, and often sent in a dish of hot roasted peanuts for us. These
peanuts grew on the Sandwich Islands. We saw the plant, the leaf of
which is very much like a clover-leaf, and the nut grows underground on
the roots like artichokes. Kind island friends had given us a large
supply of bananas and pine-apples; so we had quite a variety on our bill
of fare.

On Tuesday, the 28th of July, we came into water colored and of a
lighter shade than any we had seen. The cause of this is said to be the
immense amount of mud washed down from the gold-diggings through the
Sacramento River; I can not say whether this is true or not. We hoped to
get into San Francisco in time to dine the next day; but a calm