I was cravingly hungry by this time, for the first time since I had left my home, and everything here reminded me of eating. Santonio, I suppose, anticipated this fact, for he asked me immediately what I should like. I said I should like some tea and a slice of cold meat. He seemed amused at my choice, and while he drank a glass of some wine or other and ate a crust, I had all to myself a little round tray, with a short, stout tea-pot and enormous breakfast cup set before me; with butter as white as milk, and cream as thick as butter, the butter being developed in a tiny pat, with the semblance of the steamship we were then in stamped upon the top; also a plate covered with meat all over, upon beginning to clear which, I discovered another cartoon in blue of the same subject. After getting to the bottom of the cup, and a quarter uncovering the plate, I could do no more in that line, and Santonio asked me what I should like to do about sleeping. I was startled, for I had not thought about the coming night at all. He led me on the instant to a certain other door, and bade me peep in; I could only think of a picture I had seen of some catacombs,--in fact, I think a catacomb preferable in every respect to a sleeping cabin. The odors that rushed out, of brandy and lamp-oil, were but visionary terrors compared with the aspect of those supernaturally constructed enclosed berths, in not a few of which the victims of that entombment had already deposited themselves. "I can't sleep in there!" I said shudderingly as I withdrew, and withdrawing, was inexpressibly revived by the air blowing down the staircase. "Oh, let us sit up all night! on the sea too!" Santonio replied, with great cordiality, that he should prefer such an arrangement to any other, and would see what could be contrived for me. And so he did; and I can never surpass my own sensations of mere satisfaction as I lay upon a seat on deck by ten o'clock, with a boat-cloak for my pillow and a tarpaulin over my feet, Santonio by my side, with a cloak all over him like a skin, his feet on his fiddle-case, and an exquisitely fragrant regalia in his mouth. My feelings soon became those of careering ecstasy,--careering among stars all clear in the darkness over us; of passionate delight, rocked to a dream by the undulation I began to perceive in our seaward motion. I fell asleep about midnight, and woke again at dawn; but I experienced just enough then of existing circumstances in our position to retreat again beneath the handkerchief I had spread upon my face, and again I slept and dreamed. FOOTNOTE: [12] The Cecilia School at Lorbeerstadt is probably intended to represent the Conservatory at Leipsic, which Mendelssohn founded in 1843. CHAPTER XXV.