read, to practise shooting with
ball at a bottle swinging from some outstanding spar, or to follow
whatever pursuit most engages your fancy, for the space of some four
hours, we will just name an intermediate and somewhat tempting meal,
ycleped luncheon, chiefly indeed for the purpose of advising you to
eschew it as you value unimpaired digestion, and would appreciate a
four o'clock dinner. If, however, you are obstinately self-willed, and
choose to obey a villanous unappeasable appetite, in place of following
my wholesome advice, I pray you, at least, not to sit down knife in
hand, as I have noted "some shameless creatures do;" but lift a piece of
pilot biscuit, request some kind soul to shave the under side of the
corned round for you, then desiring the steward to follow with a tumbler
of Guiness's porter, fly the place and seek the deck.

Shuffle-board, chess, and backgammon, with exercise and pleasant
converse, will while away the intervening hours so quickly, that, if you
do not keep a bright look-out, you will be surprised by the dinner-bell
before you think of your toilet, which, if a luxury to you on shore,
will be thrice welcome at sea, besides being a pleasant way of disposing
of twenty minutes; not to mention the ladies, who, at all times sensibly
alive to any neglect in us, become doubly so here, where there is so
much to remind them that they are not ruling in their own pretty
drawing-rooms, though, as the old song has it,

"Queens they be
On the boundless sea,"

as indeed they are, and ought to be, everywhere.

_Mem._--Do not trust your appetite to forewarn you of approaching
dinner, since I have been more than once deceived by over-confidence in
that quarter: truth is, you have the cry of "wolf" from that insatiable
look-out so early and so often, that you learn after a time to treat the
call as impertinent and troublesome, and so strive to cut it until the
cutting moment really and unexpectedly comes upon you.

I have been so elaborate upon the head of breakfast, which meal, I
freely confess to be my foible, that I feel as though any description of
dinner would now come comparatively weak; besides, to speak verily, one
might, with time and prudent choice, get as good a dinner, perhaps,
a-shore in favoured countries: but for a breakfast, pho! the thing is
beyond reach, away from the stores of a well-regulated Yankee packet. I
challenge Europe, including Scotland, with all her _Finnanha