A remarkable habit the captain has at table of asking the mate if he won’t have some of everything in sight; no matter how many dishes there may be on the board, the skipper always gazes fiercely at him for a moment, and then says rapidly and severely, “Have some of the salt meat, Mr. Goggins? Have some beans? Have some potatoes? Have some bread? Have some sparrow-grass?” All this in one breath, to which the mate answers, “A leetle, if you please, sir;” or if it’s a second asking, which is merely form, he replies with his droning, “No-o-o, sir, I thank you, sir; I’ve ’ad sufficient, sir, I thank you, sir,” as though to show how he is depriving himself, for he insists that it is vulgar to enjoy eating! Sometimes the old creature corners my wife and me and entertains us with anecdotes of his acquaintances in San Francisco and how excessively numerous his influential friends are there. He will tell us that ’Arry Dolan is now getting seventy-five dollars a month at the Union Iron Works; and when we venture the opinion that he must be a rising young man, he answers, “Oh, ’Arry’s all right. Why, I knew him w’en he was gettin’ only three dollars a week at the Works.” Here generally follows a genealogical history of the Dolans for several generations, while their individual characteristics become the subject of minute discussion. Well, we’re beating slowly, slowly, down the inhospitable shores of Patagonia, and our luck doesn’t seem to be much better than it was in the southeast Trades. Latitude, 44° 49′ south; longitude, 60° 5′ west. +July 6+ If our nautical instruments had not assured us that we were at noon in about 45° south, distant one hundred and twenty-five miles from Cape Dos Bahios, we might easily have imagined the ship to be lying off Staten Island in New York Harbor. We never but once before saw the sea so free from swell, and that was in the Indian Ocean, thirty-four miles south of the equator; which position we not only held for twenty-four hours, but during that entire period no one perceived the least motion in the ship. It is true that to-day we made nearly one hundred miles; but from eight till eleven this forenoon we were motionless on the water, while a stage was slung over the stern a foot from the surface, on which the mate and the carpenter worked for two hours on the rudder-head; it is only once or twice during an entire voyage that a vessel for hours at a time will not rise and fall twelve inches. To us it is really a remarkable experience to thus float silently along within three hundred and fifty miles of the Falklands, though the skipper says, “Well, I told you we’d have light weather north of 50°.”