There is the unfailing anxiety about the weather--and there are remarks on its behaviour, past, present, and future, at every meal, and there must be incessant vigilance respecting the proceedings of the ship. The 9 o'clock observation is regarded with an interest which culminates at noon in the proceedings of the officers engaged in "catching the sun," and then comes the anxious waiting about of the passengers whilst the calculations are being worked out, till the run is announced and the result fixed over the companion. In some vessels a chart is laid out, on which the course of the ship is marked down daily. I have seen an expression of much comfort diffused over the countenances of suspicious voyagers by the inspection of the final remarks which show them "exactly where we are, you know." They are not quite aware of the tricks of the trade, and it is perhaps just as well. Then all operations aloft are attractive--taking in sail or shaking out a reef, or "taking a haul on the weather braces," which seems necessary when nothing else is to be done--and there is the wonderful problem to study of why it is that, no matter where you put yourself away on the deck of a ship, a "hand" comes to you at once to pull the particular rope you are sitting or standing on, or to otherwise civilly molest you! All these common interests bind passengers together. The smoking-room becomes conversational after a time, and "sets" are enlarged. The energies of life, however, are concentrated on but a few objects on board ship, and the general conversation and attitude of the passengers are largely regulated by the vehicle in which they are borne. And that was the course of life in the "_Gallia_." A flying-fish, a petrel, a porpoise, the glinting of a sail, the smoke of a steamer, became a subject for general conversation, if not an object of universal attraction; and when porpoises or flying-fish came close in shoals, and the "sails" were near, and the steamer's number, or better still, her name, could be read, why, there was quite enough of incident to carry one through the not very long intervals which divided the times for eating and drinking. I have not mentioned the gulls, because I think they are becoming decidedly demoralised and disreputable, and ought not to be noticed. Instead of getting their subsistence and living cleanly by honest labour, as decent gulls should do, they have become mere ocean scavengers, and follow the steamers to and fro across the Atlantic; some, I dare say, preferring the Cunard, others the Inman; and the White Star, Guion, &c., lines, probably having clientelles of their own. It is possible indeed that each vessel has its own _habitués_, just like a club or a hotel; but this is merely a theory. I am sorry to say that I have observed a tendency on the part of the solan geese to be led away to following these wakes, and if that goes on, the gulls will be driven to farming, for which, in ignorance of the