Look, with what courteous action It waves you to a more removed ground: But do not go with it. The very place puts toys of desperation, Without more motive, into every brain. _Horatio._ What are they that would speak with me? _Servant_. Sea-faring men, sir.--_Hamlet_. |WHO does not know the delightful monotony of a voyage southward, broken only at the intervals of anchoring beneath the brilliant green slopes of Madeira or under the grim shadow of the cliffs of St. Helena? The first week of the voyage for those who are not sensitive of the uneasy motion of the ship through the waves of the Bay of Biscay is perhaps the most delightful, for then every one is courteous with every one else. The passengers have not become friendly enough to be able to quarrel satisfactorily. The young ladies have got a great deal of white about them, and they have not begun to show that jealousy of each other which the next fortnight so powerfully develops. The men, too, are prodigal in their distribution of cigars; and one feels in one's own heart nothing but the most generous emotions, as one sits filling a meerschaum with Latakia in the delicate twilight of time and of thought that succeeds the curried lobster and pilau chickens as prepared in the galley of such ships as the _Cardwell Castle_. Certainly for a week of Sabbaths a September voyage to Madeira must be looked to. Things had begun to arrange themselves aboard the _Cardwell Castle_. The whist sets and the deck sets had been formed. The far-stretching arm of society had at least one finger in the construction of the laws of life in this Atlantic ship-town.