In spite of all your precautions your luggage has broken loose and has taken charge of the floor. Nothing is where you put it the night before. Your hair-brushes are under the lower berth in the farthest possible corner. Your tooth-brush is probably on the other side under the sofa; and your box of tooth-powder has got into one of your boots and has emptied itself there. Your bath-sponge has probably carried away from the rack, and got itself saturated with the contents of your only bottle of scent, which has dashed itself to pieces in its struggles to leap out of its appointed place. You squeeze this sorrowfully out into the tumbler, if there’s one left unbroken. At peril of life and limb you grope around and find your deck-shoes, and then you start out for the bathroom. The ship is groaning and shuddering like a man with tertian ague and toothache. If your sea-legs are good you get there without a broken limb or many additions to your bruises. The water in the bath is having a miniature storm all to itself. The bath is usually marble nowadays, and very hard. If you lie down in it you are absolutely at the mercy of the raging waters, and they dash you from side to side, and end to end till you struggle feebly to your feet and try to stand. You clutch at anything for support. Sometimes, as happened to a fellow-voyager of mine, it is the steam-pipe for heating the water, and off comes the skin in a twinkling. When you have got into something like an erect position you keep yourself from being hurled out with one hand and pull the string of the shower with the other. “Swish,” comes the douche, and you have a moment of cooling luxury. Then follows the slow inexorable heave of the next roll. You hold on, partly to the string; the water rises up on one side of the bath and slops over, probably filling your shoes. The douche leaves you, crosses the bathroom at an angle of sixty degrees, and drenches your pyjamas, and, peradventure, your towels as well. If this has not happened, you stagger out and dry yourself in the intervals of trying to sit or stand. Whatever else has happened to you in your bath, you’ve got cool for a few minutes. Meanwhile the pitiless sun has been rising higher, the exertion of drying yourself has put you into a violent perspiration, and you are about as wet when you give it up in despair as you were when you began. You get into your pyjamas and shoes, and, if the demoralisation of the tropics has gone far enough with you, and the bar is open, you go and get a cocktail to put a little life into you after a night of gasping, perspiring insomnia. This function is tropically termed “sweetening the bilge-water,” and is greatly in vogue among those who have sat up late in the smoking-room overnight.