Mr. Goggins is also abnormally addicted to stewed prunes, which we often have for supper. He usually disposes of four or five at each mouthful, and you wait to see him get rid of the pits; but you are disappointed, because he seems to have swallowed them. At length he has finished a large saucerful, pushes back his plate, draws his sleeve heavily across his face, leans back in his seat, looks fixedly at a point in the ceiling with a wooden face, draws in a long breath, bends over, and gently blows a dozen or so of prune-stones into his plate, like a shower of hail-stones. Then mumbling, “Hexcuse me, sir,” wriggles off his seat and out of the door. Latitude, 52° 34′ south; longitude, 89° 37′ west. +July 30+ At last we have accomplished the arduous midwinter passage of the Horn, having been twenty-two days off the stormy Cape, or just about the average; but we would have been at least a week longer had it not been for that friendly easterly wind. We actually saw the sun several times to-day, too, were enabled to ascertain our exact location, and our calculations proved to be only fifty miles out in longitude and thirty in latitude. In consideration of the fact that for about a fortnight we wrestled with powerful currents, and uncertain ones at that, the error, especially in the departure, must be considered insignificant, in view of the almost limitless sea-room. Whatever may be Captain Scruggs’s failings, he is a first-rate seaman, and a keen, astute navigator; and on many occasions near Cape Horn we had opportunities of observing his accurate, almost infallible judgment. To add to our increasing sense of comfort, the sun is mounting very rapidly in the heavens, both on account of our northing and by reason of the lengthening of the southern days. The noon altitude was 21° 20′, a very respectable height, more than double that of a week ago, when at meridian the sun, if we had been able to measure his altitude, would not have been more than 9° 30′ above the horizon. The orb, besides, had sufficient power to raise the mercury two degrees at mid-day when we hung a thermometer in his rays. Off Cape Horn in winter the temperature is usually somewhat lower than that of the North Atlantic between the British Isles and the Newfoundland Banks in January. It is only between the latter point and New York that vessels experience such an intensity of frost as to contract the mercury to zero and sheath them in several feet of solid ice. That is, in the deepest seclusions of the open sea, the weather, even in the coldest season in high latitudes, is generally mild and soft compared with that found at the same parallel near a great expanse of land. Indeed, the comparatively high temperature of the entire Southern Ocean in winter is due to the preponderance of sea, the long, narrow finger of Patagonia being the only land south of 45°, save some diminutive clusters of islands.