“Mabel was very sick, and her only comfort was to lie in my berth and take ‘strange food’ (which she immediately returned again) through a spoon which opens in a very mysterious and interesting manner out of the handle of a knife which John Holmes gave me the day we sailed.[90] However, she was up again the next day, and has continued most devoted in her attendance at table, not to speak of little supernumerary lunches of crackers and toast which she contrives to extract from the compassion of the steward or cook. The galley is a favorite place of resort for her, to which she retires as one would to a summer-house, and where, inhaling the fumes from a cooking-stove of a very warm temperament, she converses with the cook (as well as I can learn) on cosmography, and picks up little separate bits of geography like disjointed fragments of several different dissected maps. With what extraordinary and thrilling narratives she repays him I can only guess, but I heard her this morning assuring Mary that she had seen two rats, one red and the other blue, running about the cabin. Indeed, her theories on the subject of natural history correspond with that era of the science when Goldsmith wrote his ‘Animated Nature.’ She cultivates her vocal powers by singing ‘Jeannette and Jeannot’ with extraordinary vigor, and with a total irrecognition of the original air, which may arise from some hereditary contempt of the French. She assists regularly at ‘’bouting ship,’ as she calls it, standing at the wheel with admirable gravity. The Captain always takes the wheel and issues the orders when the ship is put about, and as this ceremony has taken place pretty regularly every few hours for the last eight days, Mabel has acquired all the requisite phrases. At intervals during the day, a shrill voice may be heard crying out, “Bout ship!’ ‘Mainsail ha-u-l!’ ‘Tacks and sheets!’ ‘Let go and ha-u-ll,’ the whole prefixed by an exceedingly emphatic ‘Ha-a-a-rd a lee!!’ There is no part of the vessel except the hold and the rigging which she has not repeatedly inspected. With all the sailors she is on intimate terms, and employs them at odd hours in the manufacture of various articles of furniture.... Nannie has been a constant source of interest and amusement to Mabel, who climbs up to visit her every day fifty times at least, and gives her little handfuls of hay and oats which Nannie seems to eat with a particular relish.”