ing for a knife on one of the shelves just over my head.

Another little plum out of my plain sailor's pudding. This time my
ship was an East Indian trader that whilst lying at Calcutta was
chartered by the Government to convey troops to the North of China. It
was in 1860. Difficulties had arisen, and John Chinaman was to be
attacked. We proceeded to Hong Kong with the headquarters of the 60th
Rifles on board, and thence to the Gulf of Peche-li, which I should
say submitted one of the finest spectacles in the world, with its
congregations of transports and English and French and Yankee ships of
war. It was an old-world scene which the sponge of time has
obliterated for ever, and I behold again in memory those two noble
frigates, the _Imperieuse_ and the _Chesapeake_, straining tightly at
their cables, with smoke-stacks too modest in proportions to impair to
the critical nautical eye the tack and sheet suggestions of the
graceful, exquisitely symmetrical fabric of spars and yards and
rigging soaring triumphantly aloft to where the long whip or pennant
at the main flickered like a delicate line of fire against the hard
cold blue of the Asiatic sky.

We lay for many months in that bay, and were obliged repeatedly to
send ashore for fresh meat, vegetables, and the like. On one occasion
I recollect going with the mate in the long-boat some distance up the
river Peiho, a rushing, turbid stream at the mouth of which the
Chinese had fixed a very _chevaux-de-frise_ of spikes, upon which they
had fondly hoped our men-of-war would impale themselves, forgetting
that the depth of water scarcely permitted the approach of a shallow
gunboat. We were returning to the ship with a fair wind, and on top of
the fierce rush of the river, when our helmsman run us plump against
one of Johnny's huge impalers. The shock of the blow threw the mate
into an immense basket of fresh eggs. He fell with a squelch past all
power of forgetting, and lay wriggling in a very quagmire of yolk and
white and fragments of shells. We pulled him out blind and streaming
with eggs. His aspect was so preposterously absurd that the helmsman,
rendered almost imbecile by laughter, let the boat drive into a second
pile, when, as I live to write it, the mate, who was cleaning himself
near to the basket, was thrown a second time into the glutinous mess!
I will not attempt to repeat the sea-blessings he bestowed upon the
steersman. Happily eggs were cheap, and a dollar mi