We passed the Whale's Back at the mouth of the Piscataqua, and the Isles of Shoals loomed up through the hazy atmosphere; and although the wind was light, and the sea apparently smooth, the brig began to have a motion an awkward, uneasy motion for which I could not account, and which, to my great annoyance, continued to increase as we left the land. I staggered as I crossed the quarter-deck, and soon after we cleared the harbor, came near pitching overboard from the platform covering the sheep-pens. My head was strangely confused, and a dizziness seized me, which I in vain struggled to shake off. My spirits, so gay and buoyant as we sailed down the harbor, sunk to zero. At length I could not resist the conviction that I was assailed with symptoms of seasickness, a malady which I had always held in contempt, believing it to exist more in imagination than in fact, and which I was determined to resist, as unsailor-like and unmanly. Other symptoms of a less equivocal description, soon placed the character of my illness beyond a doubt. My woe-begone looks must have betrayed my feelings, for one of the men told me, with a quizzical leer, that old Neptune always exacted toll in advance from a green hand for his passage over the waters. Mr. Thompson, who seemed to pity my miserable condition, gravely assured me that exercise was a capital thing as a preventive or cure for seasickness, and advised me to try the pump. I followed his advice: a few strokes brought up the bilge water, than which nothing at that time could have been more insufferably nauseous! I left the pump in disgust, and retiring to the after part of the quarter-deck, threw myself down on a coil of rope, unable longer to struggle with my fate. There I remained unnoticed and uncared for for several hours, when, the wind having changed, the rope which formed my bed, and proved to be the "main sheet," was wanted, and I was unceremoniously ejected from my quarters, and roughly admonished to "go below and keep out of the way!" I crawled into the cabin, and, stretched on some boxes, endeavored to get a little sleep; but the conglomeration of smells of a most inodorous character, which, as it seemed to my distempered fancy, pervaded every part of the vessel, prevented my losing a sense of suffering in sleep. As I lay musing on the changes which a few days had wrought in my condition, and, borne down by the pangs of seasickness, was almost ready to admit that there was prose as well as poetry in a sailor's life, I was startled by a terrific noise, the announcement, I supposed, of some appalling danger. I heard distinctly three loud knocks on the deck at the entrance of the steerage, and then a sailor put his head down the companion-way, and in a voice loud, cracked, and discordant, screamed in a tone which I thought must have split his jaws asunder, "LA-AR-BO-A-RD W-A-T-CH A-H-O-O-Y."