At noon to-day, however, the western sky indicated a breeze, and presently a little breath stole ever so gently over the quiet ocean, scarcely curling the smooth, level plane of the sea; and, gradually freshening, the ship gathered steerage way in five minutes or so and began to lazily move ahead through a large flock of Cape pigeons which had settled to feed in great numbers during the calm, though we could perceive nothing edible in the water. The birds seemed to delight in the breeze as much as we did, for in light weather they seldom rise higher than a few feet above the surface, lacking the force of wind which enables them to rise easily; as in a strong breeze they make no further effort than to guide themselves, rising and falling without movement of wing. A huge, hoary albatross, a perfect old patriarch, has been with us all day, skimming over the water so closely as to touch it occasionally with his breast, and seldom more than a foot from it. It is wonderful that they can maintain so close and uniform a flight to the surface, without movement and in a calm. The day before yesterday, being more exasperated than ever before at the skipper’s continuous grumbling at the weather, I told him that I thought that he asked altogether too much in demanding a fair wind all the time, and that when a man began a voyage he ought to expect more or less head-winds throughout the passage, for they were to be expected anywhere and at any minute at sea during a whole voyage, even in the Trades. Since then he hasn’t said a word against the weather, and is, for him, extremely agreeable. Heavens, how hairy he is! So thickly covered is his whole face that the only visible bare spots are his nose and eyes; for his beard grows right up over his cheek-bones, and his eyebrows seem to be spreading all over his forehead. So dense are his whiskers that when he comes on deck after a session with his Dutch pipe the smoke can still be seen eddying and seething in his beard. Last evening as we were reading some of Kipling’s delightful sea-poems the skipper called down and asked whether we wouldn’t like to see a lunar rainbow. We went on deck at once, and there, sure enough, was a perfect specimen of this strange phenomenon, and so clearly defined that the brighter colors were distinctly visible. We had seen but one lunar rainbow before, and that was a very faint one in the Bay of Bengal, about one hundred miles from the Sandheads. It is a curious fact that, like captains, there are comparatively few foremast hands who remain perfectly strong and well throughout a long passage. At least eight of ours are looking quite seedy, some with bad colds, others with various disorders of liver and stomach, so that they have to be doctored and fixed up with an assortment of medicines. The way that five-grain blue-mass pills fly around on a deep-water ship is a caution; one would think they were peppermint drops. Latitude 45° 20′ south; longitude 62° 10′ west. +July 7+