hours out of the twenty-four. American captains profess to think that weighing out food to sailors is very degrading, and they always add, “It’s too much like them Britishers.” Personally I have never been able to perceive where the indignity comes in. Food is weighed out in the navy, so why not in the merchant service? I had it on my mind to-day to ask Captain Scruggs which he really considered the more debasing, giving a man a stipulated quantity of food, or knocking his teeth out with wooden or iron implements and then kicking him into the scuppers; but I thought it best to preserve peace rather than advance so hazardous a question. Latitude, 23° 18′ north; longitude, 128° 40′ west. +September 5+ Oh, what magnificent weather this is! It is just like those grand days in the southeast Trades. Our everlasting recollections of the Pacific Ocean, both north and south, will be of weeks of a matchless climate; deep cobalt sky, sprinkled with little pink, cirrus clouds; a calm sea over which shoot thousands of flying-fish in glittering flight, and soft, enchanting breezes. “What about those two or three disagreeable days not long ago?” says the pessimist. True, they were not ideal days; but they only serve to show off these lovely ones in all their glorious perfection. We have, unhappily, passed the limits of the tropics, however, having crossed the circle of Cancer yesterday at four o’clock. A few minutes ago, at the pumps, Broadhead asked me, “Would you mind telling me why you came out here in an American ship?” I told him why,--that, having made one voyage in an Englishman, we wanted to compare the vessels; and I also reminded him that foreign ships are not allowed to trade between American ports. “Well, you and the lady must have lots of courage,” said he. “Now there’s the Loch Line of ships to Australia out of London; you ought to have gone in one o’ them.” “Yes; MacFoy told me about them,” said I. “Well, they’re worth all you can say in favor of ’em,” continued this American; “they’re dandies; carry lots o’ passengers, first- and second-class and steerage. Each ship has what they call a double crew; say a ship had fourteen men before the mast, one o’ these would have twenty-eight, so the whole of an ordinary ship’s crew is on deck at one time, and not a stroke o’ work is ever done aloft after eight in the morning, so that nothing can drop on passengers’ heads.” This may seem like getting things down to too fine a point; but any one who has voyaged in a sailing vessel will remember how many articles drop from men working aloft. We have seen at least a dozen objects fall during the voyage,--knives, paint-brushes, and serving-mallets, any one of which dropping on a man’s head from a height of at least a hundred feet would be very painful, not to say dangerous.