"I really have not anything to say about our stay in Marseilles, because nothing of importance happened there. We only spent one whole day in the place, Saturday, and on Sunday, at 9 a.m., we embarked on board one of the magnificent steamers belonging to the _Messageries Maritime_, which plies to India and China. "Neither have I anything to tell you of our trip across. Amongst the passengers were a number of our fellow-countrymen, on their way to Calcutta and Singapore, some Dutch going to Java, and a great many French, principally from Marseilles, with whom Mohammed-Abd-el-Gazal got on famously. "We reached Naples in about forty hours, and three days afterwards landed in Egypt. The weather throughout was magnificent, and the Mediterranean as calm as the Thames. We, all of us, were wonderfully well except the faithful Joseph, who, as he did not deny himself anything, fell a victim to sea-sickness. How did he contrive to be ill, if the sea was so calm? you will ask. I really do not know; his ways are not our ways. If only he would have conducted his sickness in a discreet and poetical manner, as I have myself often done, and wholesale, too! But no—his sickness was of the most intrusive and prosaic character. My dear Emily, these common people cannot do anything gracefully, whereas an English girl who has been well brought up, on the contrary, elevates even the most trivial things. "The trip to me, indeed, was simply enchanting. I gazed once more on the clear, blue sky, without which I can no longer exist. Africa knew me again, and overflowing with loving care, wafted me her sweetest odours. At length T was no longer shut up in a box, as I had been in Paris and Marseilles; I could tread the deck from stem to stern. My feet were carried away with delight, and walked—oh! how they walked! According to the calculations of M. Périères, who made a regular study of me, and, every now and then, without my knowing it, fastened a pedometer to my back, I walked about forty miles a day, from end to end of the ship. "Very often, even at night, when the heavens were studded with twinkling stars, I resumed my walk after supper. The passengers who had betaken themselves to their cabins and wished to sleep, complained more than a little of the noise I made over their heads. But that did not affect me in the least; I am above all those petty considerations, and the deck is open to all the world. One evening, however, as I was walking, from choice, on the poop, I heard, just as I was over one of the starboard cabins, a voice immediately beneath me. 'Oho!' thought I to myself, 'here we have a fractious kind of sleeper. Wait a bit, my friend, and I'll teach you to knock like that and try to impose silence on a British female!' And with that, instead of going farther away, I began to stamp above that ill-advised cabin.