'How do you think she looks?' 'Not as she'll look when I bring her back to you, sir.' 'It's astonishing what a lot of colouring matter there is for the blood in sea air,' said Captain Burke. 'When I was first going to sea I was as pale as a baker; or, as my old father used to say, as a nun's lips with kissing of beads; afterwards----' he paused with an arch look at his wife. 'And the colour isn't always that of rum either,' he added. 'Where does the ship first sail to, nurse?' said I. 'Tell my young lady, Edward,' she answered. 'We're bound to Valparaiso, and that's by way of Cape Horn,' said the captain. 'We there discharge, fill afresh, and thence to Sydney, New South Wales, thence to Algoa Bay, and so home--a beautiful round voyage.' 'Right round the world, and so many lovely lands to view besides!' exclaimed Mrs. Burke, looking at me; 'always in one ship, too, in one home, Sir Mortimer, with me to see to her. Oh, I shall love to have her!' My father looked out of the window at the wild whirl of snow that had thickened till it was all flying whiteness through the glass, with the coming and going of the thunder of a squall in the chimney, and a subdued note of the snarling of surf, and said, 'Cape Horn will be a cold passage for Miss Otway.' 'It's more bracing than cold,' said Captain Burke. 'People that talk of Cape Horn and the ice there don't know, I reckon, that parrots and humming birds are to be met with in Strait le Maire. I was shipmate with a man who's been picking fuchsias in such another snowfall as this down on the coast of Patagonia.' 'Miss Marie, you should see an iceberg; it's a beautiful sight when lighted up by the sun,' said my nurse. 'Beautifuller when under the moon and lying becalmed like a floating city of marble, and nothing breaking the quiet save the breathing of grampuses,' exclaimed the captain.