However, it would not be long before the 'Cambrian' was under way, and, indeed, whilst I was seeing to my baggage in my berth, and taking a view of the bedroom I was to sleep in for thirty-five or forty days, I heard noises and felt a vibration which satisfied me we were about to start. The vessel was something less than nine hundred tons; she was fitted with a saloon, on either hand of which went a range of sleeping berths, and the amidships was filled with a long table. She was rigged as a schooner, with a couple of yards on each mast, and sat with a promise of swiftness in her posture, her bow being yacht-like and sharp, dominant, that is, with a good spring, whilst the run of her vanished in a very pretty mould of stern. She would be laughed at now; side by side with the Cape white giantess of to-day, thrashing from the top of the North Atlantic to the other bottom of the South Atlantic in a trifle more than a fortnight, how meanly would she show! even as a pinnace or steam launch in the shadow of the man-of-war that owns her. No splendour of internal fittings; nothing rememberable in the form of smoke-room or bath-room. And still my heart swells with the memory of that little iron steamer, which long since ceased, save as one of the countless spectres of the deep, the true and only phantom ships of the sea. It was a bleak, dark November day when we started; a strong wind blew, and the sky was thick and near with rolling snow-clouds. We passed along Southampton Water in a squall of sleet, and though imagination was never an inactive quality in me, yet then, more keenly than at any previous time, was I able to realise the significance of Wall's story of the dismasted hull, the high foaming seas of the great ocean past the Horn, the mountains of ice rocking their lofty summits in the smoke of flying flakes. It was blowing fresh in the open, clear of the Isle of Wight; the little steamer pitched and sprang and made vile weather of the spiteful snap of that November Channel surge. She drove the most of us to our berths, and for four days I was a prisoner, stupidly sick and helpless. Then I stepped forth feeling well again, and making my way on to the poop found a fine day, a swelling sea, a rattling breeze astern, before which the vessel, with bladder-like canvas swelling hard from her yards and black funnel pouring smoke over the bows to the horizon ahead, was bowling and rolling, with an occasional kick up astern which drove a shock and vibration of exposed screw through the length of her.