g more monotonous than a voyage from Liverpool to New York.

Nine times out of ten--not to say ninety-nine times out of a
hundred--the passage is bad. The Atlantic Ocean has an ugly temper; it
has forever got its back up. Sulky, angry, and terrible by turns, it
only takes a few days' rest out of every year, and this always occurs
when you are not crossing.

And then, the wind is invariably against you. When you go to America, it
blows from the west; when you come back to Europe, it blows from the
east. If the captain steers south to avoid icebergs, it is sure to begin
to blow southerly.

Doctors say that sea-sickness emanates from the brain. I can quite
believe them. The blood rushes to your head, leaving your extremities
cold and helpless. All the vital force flies to the brain, and your legs
refuse to carry you. It is with sea-sickness as it is with wine. When
people say that a certain wine goes up in the head, it means that it is
more likely to go down to the feet.

There you are, on board a huge construction that rears and kicks like a
buck-jumper. She lifts you up bodily, and, after well shaking all your
members in the air several seconds, lets them down higgledy-piggledy,
leaving to Providence the business of picking them up and putting them
together again. That is the kind of thing one has to go through about
sixty times an hour. And there is no hope for you; nobody dies of it.

[Illustration: "YOUR LEGS REFUSE TO CARRY YOU."]

Under such conditions, the mental state of the boarders may easily be
imagined. They smoke, they play cards, they pace the deck like bruin
pacing a cage; or else they read, and forget at the second chapter all
they have read in the first. A few presumptuous ones try to think, but
without success. The ladies, the American ones more especially, lie on
their deck chairs swathed in rugs and shawls like Egyptian mummies in
their sarcophagi, and there they pass from ten to twelve hours a day
motionless, hopeless, helpless, speechless. Some few incurables keep to
their cabins altogether, and only show their wasted faces when it is
time to debark. Up they come, with cross, stupefied, pallid,
yellow-green-looking physiognomies, and seeming to say: "Speak to me, if
you like, but don't expect me to open my eyes or answer you, and above
all, don't shake me."

Impossible to fraternize.

The crossing now takes about six days and a half. By the time you have
spent two in getting your sea legs on