"Oh! the pleasures of a summer trip across the Atlantic!" Thus sung and chorused my good friends one and all; some from experience, most from hearsay, but ever in unison. "You'll have quite a party of pleasure," says one. "The only thing to be dreaded will be the _ennui_ arising out of long calms, gentle breezes, eternal sunshine by day and moonlight by night," says another. One would have fancied, according to their account, that sun and moon alternated like buckets in a well, one up, the other down, with the exception that both were to be always at full. So constant, however, were these remarks about heat, and sun, and summer air, that I packed up every article of clothing heavier than duck or cachmere; nay, had not some worthy matter-of-fact soul let slip a stray hint about ice and sleighing parties in December, I verily believe, hating as I do all superfluous baggage, I should have left my greatcoats to the moth and fog of Old England. But whew! from such _airs_ the Lord preserve me!--whilst at the tail of our honest, grimy, grumbling steamer, cutting through the Mersey or along the coast of Wales, we were, I admit, tolerably sunned and warm enough, though not even here bedazzled or over-heated; but on the second morning out, what a change! I came on deck just before six A.M. to take my shower-bath; the wind was about west by south, blowing a brisk gale, the ship under double-reefed topsails, with top-gallant sails set over them, making all smoke again--on one hand lay the Isle of Rathlin, with the north coast of Ireland, bleak and bare; on the other, the Mull of Kyntyre, with a tide of its own rushing by like a mill-race, and over it the cloudy crest of Isla, looming through the flitting vapours, cold, dark, and hard-visaged, as though no drop of whisky had ever been brewed therein. One could not recognise the misty monster, thus grimly shadowed forth, to be the parent of that glorious sunny spirit. We had full time afforded to become well acquainted with the changing aspects of these and the other localities hereabouts, for we had to battle it with their ally the wind, and with their waters, for full sixty hours; and although we at length fought our course seaward, it was to feel that such another victory would be anything but serviceable to the gallant ship. Oh that infernal Rathlin! I shall not soon forget it; it is a spot I always held in ill odour ever since Miss Porter's "Scottish Chiefs" taught my unsophisticated youth to weep over the wrongs of Wallace wight. Now, although I abominate the place more, I have learned to compassionate her ill-starred hero less, since to have been carried southward through "merrie England" from such a place of exile, albeit the journey ended in hanging, was yet a deliverance especially to be rejoiced in.