long, black, thin pig-tail curling and writhing several feet behind him. After the water had partly run off, half burying the men on the lee foresheet, our little Chinaman lay very still, and we feared that he was badly hurt, though the men were roaring with laughter, while the skipper thundered “Why in h---- don’t yer pick him up?” to the mates, who stood as though petrified, gazing at a cask of sea-water bearing down on the cook which would have flattened him like one of his own pancakes. All at once he came to, however, saw the barrel almost on him, and skilfully rolled out of the way of it, escaping with some painful bruises on his arms. This was the only sea that boarded us, and we were soon straightened out on the old port tack, steering southwest, and doing scarcely four knots, for we were under short canvas and the seas pounded us back, and even now we will hardly go free of the land; for in spite of our twelve hours of easting during the night, a powerful northwest current has set us back to such an extent that our noon sight showed us that we were only ten miles farther off-shore than at the corresponding hour yesterday, and that we had made only thirty miles of southing. If the wind shifts only a point, though, we might be able to weather the land after all. Last night the mate and I had a conversation about fast passages, and he said to me, “I can tell yer, there was plenty of smart ships thirty or forty years ago that yer never hear tell of nowadays. There’s the Boston ship ‘Siren,’ as I was mate of; we were comin’ around from Coquimbo, bound to Liverpool, when we were caught in a pampero off the river Plate. It come in a squall as usual, and the fust thing I know, there was the fore- and maint’-gallant-masts over the side. We didn’t have no spare spars aboard, but, in spite of that, we went from 3° south right into Liverpool in nineteen days. Pretty good for a lame duck, and considering the Doldrums, too. “Then there was a smart passage I heered tell of the other day about a modern ship, the British ship ‘King George’; she went from Cape Town up to the Delaware Capes in forty-seven days.” This last was really a fine performance, for the distance which she covered was six thousand eight hundred miles. Compare this passage with the voyages of sailing vessels to the westward across the North Atlantic in winter. They are nearly always fifty days coming across, and not infrequently seventy, or nearly a month longer than the “King George” was from South Africa, while the distance is less than half.