Every day now, particularly at supper, we enter the dining-room with distended eyes, trying to discover some surprise in the culinary department. Usually, however, when the covers are removed, there lie disclosed the same old standbys,--stewed beef or mutton, cold beef and ham, biscuits, and boiled potatoes the size of hot-house grapes, though none the worse for that. Indeed, we went to sea with several barrels of new Bermuda potatoes at ten dollars the barrel; this will show the unstinted manner in which this ship was stored aft. Sometimes, though, we are stunned by some fantastic creation of the Chinaman’s. Last night, for instance, when the steward whipped off the huge pewter covers, each almost as big as an umbrella, we were entranced by the appearance of something entirely new. In a deep vegetable dish lay four enormous Welsh rarebits? Oh, the gladness of that moment! What mattered it that the bread was a blood relative of india-rubber, that the rarebits were clammy and inflexible, or that the rind of a pineapple cheese had contributed to their manufacture? Were they not a change, and as such to be venerated and exalted beyond price? Therefore we helped ourselves reverently, as became so momentous an occasion; and if the compound did produce an incalculable amount of subsequent distress, we extended meek thanks and congratulations to the little Cantonite in the galley. In truth, though, there is no fault of any sort to be found with the cabin food; it is every bit as good as when we started. Last evening, in the second dog-watch, the Scotch bosun came up to me on the main-deck and asked how we were getting on. I told him, very well indeed; and then he said, “Before we left I heard that a gentleman and his wife were going out in the ship, and be gob I felt sorry for them.” Good old MacFoy! He is continuously solicitous for our welfare; and a day or two ago he came aft with a copy of Dickens’s “Christmas Stories” which he had found in the forecastle library furnished by the Seamen’s Friend Society, and said that he had found a fine sea story for me to read in the book, called “The Wreck of the Golden Mary.” It is a fact worthy of note that this rough sailor-man is the only individual whom I have ever met who has read this delightful account of a shipwreck off Cape Horn. The best-read man whom I ever knew said that he had never even heard of it. In every art, though, there seem to be one or two jewels that exist unknown even to the connoisseur. How many musicians are there, thorough musicians though they may be, who know the gorgeous, glorious chorus in A, _andante sostenuto_, from Schubert’s Lazarus? Gorgeous in its tone colors, glorious in its fire and rhythm, it is an almost unknown fragment from that transcendent mind. Latitude, 27° 58′ north; longitude, 132° 20′ west. +September 7+