No matter how frequently the fell malady of the sea should assail them--at breakfast, or lunch, or dinner, or at any of the other and many meals which the ship's caterer thought necessary to our diurnal wants--these delicate fair ones would "never say die," on having to beat a precipitate retreat to their cabins.

They would return again, I assure you, in a few minutes, to resume the repast which had been temporarily interrupted; smiling as if nothing had happened, and showing, too, that nothing _had_ happened, to seriously interfere with their deglutinal faculties! This was not my first voyage--I did not tell you so before?
Well, suppose I did not; don't you remember my saying that I was not aware of being under any obligation to you which would make me regard you as the receptor of _all_ my secrets?
This was not my first voyage, I say; consequently, ship-board life was no novelty to me--nor the Atlantic Ocean, either, for that matter.

I was used to the one, I had seen the other previously.

I was as much at home to both, in fact, as I had been in the vicarage parlour standing beside dear little Miss Pimpernell's old arm-chair in the chimney corner! I love the sea, in rest or unrest.
It is never monotonous to me, as some find it; for I think it ever- changing, ever new.

I love it always--under every aspect of its kaleidoscopic face.
When, bright with mellow sunshine, it reflects the intense blue of the ocean sky above, with a brisk breeze topping its many-furrowed waves-- that are racing by and leaping over each other like a parcel of schoolboys at play--and cutting off sheets and sparkling showers of the prismatic foam that exhibits every tint of the rainbow--azure and orange, violet, light-green, and pale luminous white,--scatters it broadcast into the air around; whence it falls into yeasty hollows, a sort of feathery snow of a fairy texture, just suited for the bridal veils of the Nereides--only to be churned over again and tossed up anew by the wanton wind in its frolicsome mirth.
Or, when, in a dead calm, it appears to lie sleeping, heaving its tumid bosom in occasional long-drawn sighs--that make it rise and sink in rounded ridges of an oily look and a leadeny tinge, except at the equator, where they shine at midday like a burnished mirror.
Or, again, when storm-tossed and tempest-weary, it rages and raves with all its pent-up fury broken loose--goaded to frenzy by the howling lashes of Aeolus and the roar of the storm-fiend.