a-sick
visage, is asking every one "if they think he may land without a
passport." You scarcely recognise him for the cigar-smoking dandy of
yesterday, that talked as if he had lived half his life on the continent.
While there, a rather pretty girl is looking intently at some object in
the blue water, beside the rudder post. You are surprised you cannot
make it out; but then, she has the advantage of you, for the tall,
well-looking man, with the knowing whiskers, is evidently whispering
something in her ear.

"Steward, this is not my trunk--mine was a leather--"

"All the 'leathers' are gone in the first boat, sir."

"Most scandalous way of doing business."

"Trouble you for two-and-sixpence, sir."

"There's Matilda coughing again," says a thin, shrewish woman, with a
kind of triumphant scowl at her better half; "but you would have her wear
that thin shawl!"

"Whatever may be the fault of the shawl, I fancy no one will reproach her
ancles for thinness," murmurs a young Guard's man, as he peeps up the
companion-ladder.

Amid all the Babel of tongues, and uproar of voices, the thorough bass of
the escape steam keeps up its infernal thunders, till the very brain
reels, and, sick as you have been of the voyage, you half wish yourself
once more at sea, if only to have a moment of peace and tranquillity.

Numbers now throng the deck who have never made their appearance before.
Pale, jaundiced, and crumpled, they have all the sea-sick look and
haggard cheek of the real martyr--all except one, a stout, swarthy,
brown-visaged man, of about forty, with a frame of iron, and a voice like
the fourth string of a violincello. You wonder why he should have taken
to his bed: learn, then, that he is his Majesty's courier from the
foreign office, going with despatches to Constantinople, and that as he
is not destined to lie down in a bed for the next fourteen days, he is
glad even of the narrow resemblance to one, he finds in the berth of a
steam-boat. At length you are on shore, and marched off in a long
string, like a gang of convicts to the Bureau de l'octroi, and here is
begun an examination of the luggage, which promises, from its minuteness,
to last for the three months you destined to spend in Switzerland. At
the end of an hour you discover that the soi disant commissionaire will
transact all this affair for a few francs; and, after a tiresome wait in
a filthy room, jostled, elbowed, and trampled upon, by boors with s