In my own case, the small size of the ship had a special advantage, as I was allowed to take the wheel whenever I liked, which could hardly have been the case in a large one; and really the steering her over the grand waves in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans in half a gale of wind was not very much inferior to driving a racing coach. One day, however, I was let in for rather more than I bargained for. It was blowing an increasingly heavy gale off Cape Horn, such as it knows how to blow in that part of the world in winter, and the hands were all aloft taking in sail, when the skipper turned to me and said, "I wish you would take the wheel and send the man forward, as I want more strength aloft." Thus the whole crew were in the rigging, and if by any mistake I had allowed the sail they were reefing to fill, they must have been carried overboard with it. It may seem rather a happy-go-lucky way of sending a ship to sea, for the crew to be so short-handed as to make it necessary to call in the aid of a passenger in such an emergency, but those were the "pre-Plimsoll days," and before ships' masters and other officers were subjected to examinations. In one ship on board which I sailed, the owner was overheard to say to a friend who had accompanied him on board, "With such a captain and such a mate, I only wonder the ship ever comes home safe again." If we return to the other element we shall see that though improvements had taken place, to some extent, as early as the beginning of this century, still little had been effected before the year 1820. From that date great improvements were made in everything connected with road travelling, so much so, that we in England congratulated ourselves that it had pretty well arrived at perfection, when, lo and behold! a new power asserted itself, and produced such a metamorphosis that few persons not exceeding fifty years of age have ever taken a long road journey in their lives. Road travelling is as much a thing of the past as "pigtails," and if it were not for the few coaches running in the summer from Hatchett's and other places in London, the shape of such a thing would be forgotten by most people. As it is, those give but a slight notion of what a long coach used to look like when commencing its journey of 150 or 200 miles. It would be looked upon as a curiosity if one was placed in the Baker Street Bazaar, or some other suitable site, loaded as they used to be. Probably there are not twenty of us now living who have put one of these loads on with our own hands, or would have any idea of how to build it up. [Illustration: THE EXTRA COACH AT CHRISTMAS.]