Miles passed 286. We are now 1962 miles from New York. We have been out just one week, and, for five days, we have had a strong head wind. To-day the wind has increased into a violent storm. The decks are swept with rain and spray. The ocean is white with foam. Our ship, enormous as it is, is tossed, like a bubble, upon these raging billows. You start to cross the saloon; a wave lifts the stern of the ship some twenty feet into the air, and you find yourself pitching down a steep hill. You lean back as far as possible to preserve your balance, when suddenly another wave, with gigantic violence, thrusts up the bows of the ship, and you have a precipitous eminence before you. Just as you are recovering from your astonishment, the ship takes a lurch, and, to your utter confusion, you find yourself floundering in a lady's lap, who happens to be reading upon a sofa on one side of the saloon. Hardly have you commenced your apology ere another wave comes kindly to your rescue, and pitches you bodily out of the door. It is with the utmost difficulty that I write. I have, however, contrived to block up my inkstand with books, and, by clinging to the table, succeed in making these hieroglyphics, which I fear that the printer will hardly be able to read. Many are very sick and very miserable. I am in a state of submissive endurance. The reader, however, may be fully assured, that there are many positions far more agreeable than to be on the middle of the Atlantic ocean in a wet, easterly storm. Our noble ship is so magnificently strong, that we have no more sense of danger than when upon the land. There is something in this nausea, which seems to paralyze all one's mental energies. Never before have I found such an effort of _will_ requisite to make any mental exertions. There was a portion of the evening, however, notwithstanding all these discomforts, passed very pleasantly away. In the boudoir-like magnificence of the ladies' saloon, with our excellent captain, and a few intelligent and pleasant companions, gentlemen and ladies, we almost forgot, for an hour, the storm and the gloom without, and conversed with just as much joyousness as if we had been in the most luxurious parlor on the land. These saloons, brilliantly lighted with carcel lamps, look far more gorgeous and imposing by night than by day. It is now eleven o'clock at night. Every other moment an enormous billow lifts us high into the air, and then we go down, down, down, exciting that peculiar sensation which I remember often to have had in my dreams, when a child. The scene from the deck is truly sublime. The howling of the tempest, the rush of the waves, the roar of the sea, the blackness of the night, the reflection that we are more than a thousand miles from any land, floating like a bubble upon the vast waves, all combine to invest this midnight hour upon the ocean with sublimity. The waves to-night will rock us to sleep, while the winds wail our mournful lullaby.