“One by one, by the star-dogged moon, Too quick for groan or sigh, Each turned his face with a ghastly pang And cursed me with his eye.” There is another cause, however, for the skipper’s bad temper; yesterday we slaughtered our first pig, and at all three meals to-day we had fresh pork. Captain Scruggs caused prodigious quantities of it to disappear and has been in anguish ever since. Indeed, it is hard to imagine anything edible which will so upset one’s digestion as fresh pork at sea; it is bad enough ashore, where plenty of exercise is to be had, but aboard ship one hearty meal of pork freshly killed will cause an incredible amount of distress. The skipper instanced an illustration of how difficult it is to digest at sea: on the last outward voyage he killed a pig just before he reached San Francisco, and, the weather being too warm to keep the meat sweet, most of it was given to the sailors. Now, these men can digest sour, soggy bread and salt beef like ironwood, yet this fresh pork vanquished them, and five men were actually laid up in their bunks at the end of the second day. Had many severe hail-squalls during the last twenty-four hours, but fine weather otherwise, sharp and clear. Latitude, 44° 41′ south; longitude, 59° 58′ west. +July 5+ Very light southerly airs and a calm sea have added vastly to our surprise at such weather off Patagonia. How remarkable it is to find these gentle, variable winds here, when the popular notion of this region is a continuous westerly gale! Findlay’s “South Atlantic Directory,” however, indicates generally fine weather from 40° to 50° south _near the land_, and this has been our skipper’s almost invariable experience, except that the wind ought to be to the northward instead of to the southward of west; at the present moment, though, the breeze shows signs of hauling to the northward with the sun, instead of against, so perhaps it will stop there for a while. The wind has been so light and contrary for the twenty-four hours, that in that period we made only eight miles of latitude and seven of longitude!