We had a little excitement to-day at dinner. Ever since our cabin fire has been going, it has been the custom of the steward to put a can of whatever vegetable we were to have that day for dinner upon the top of the stove to heat; the proper way, of course, is to place the can in a dish of water and that in turn upon the stove or what not. To-day it was a tin of string-beans, and the steward, fully an hour before dinner, put the can upon the stove, which was nearly red-hot. (The warmer the day the hotter the fire, here as elsewhere.) When the soup had been cleared away, the gentle, timid little Malay took the tin into the pantry and attacked it with a can-opener. But no sooner was the metal pierced than the whole pantry was filled with a suffocating steam that rushed hissing out of the vent with the most astonishing fury. We sat aghast. The old man cursed a little and the mate got up, but instantly thought better of it and sat down again. And still the steam came belching out of the can, which had fallen down and was shooting about the pantry like a demented steam-cylinder, while we could dimly perceive the slender form of the little steward through the pungent vapory clouds making courageous efforts to lay hold of the bewitched bean-can. For nearly a minute steam continued to escape with such force that it almost shrieked; and had the tin remained another five minutes on the stove it must certainly have exploded and scattered boiling water, beans, and jagged fragments of tin and lead about the room. Last evening at supper a bottle of Apollinaris burst in my hand with a loud report as I was opening it, scaring the valiant Goggins into upsetting a full cup of tea upon a clean cloth, for which the old man fixed him with his eye and held him thus for quite half a minute during an awful silence. If only for the sake of the sailors we are anxious to get into warm weather again as soon as possible. Now that they have removed the mufflers, etc., from their necks and heads, we can see how pale and washed out most of them are. There are only two among them who do not bear ocular proof of the hardships of a month in the Southern Ocean in July. Paddy is perhaps the worst looking of the whole crew, though he cannot be thirty years of age. This is due probably to his never, under any circumstances, shirking his work, and to his exerting himself more than any one else in the ship. Indeed, he was so full of nerve and energy in the worst weather, that the captain surprised us once by saying, pointing to Paddy on a yard-arm in a heavy squall, “There’s what I call a brave man; he doesn’t know what fear is.” The skipper didn’t mean to insinuate that Paddy was courageous for going out on the yard at that moment; he was thinking about his general conduct.