Many of my contemporary travellers will remember how from start to finish of a voyage the table was crowded at breakfast, lunch, and dinner with bottles containing various wines; in addition to which there were frequent descents to the cuddy to slake an imaginary thirst with a B. and S. This inordinate and imaginary thirst died a natural death under the new system of paying for what is ordered. A bottle of claret on the breakfast table became the exception rather than the rule: few made it “eight bells” to any extent, and the pop of soda-water bottles became very rare. From the suspicious way in which we English approach each other, whether in a private room or in a public conveyance, it would seem as if there lurked in our composition some of that cautious mistrust so characteristic of the wild beast. But after having been a week or so in each other’s company, the passengers positively began to thaw towards one another; a welcome change that was, however, succeeded by a still harder frost. For a time, indeed, we constituted a happy family, dancing, singing, and acting together; but this temporary and unstable fusion of minds was doomed to resolve itself into two antagonistic elements, an untoward state of affairs that culminated only as the good ship drew near her destination. There were two ways of accounting for this division in the camp; my own view of the matter was that we saw too much of each other from “rosy morn till dewy eve,” which, besides breeding contempt, gave birth to that “green-eyed monster,” jealousy. But the sailors ascribed all that went wrong to the presence of so many clergymen, whom they looked upon as the _fons et origo_ of storms and everything undesirable. It is, however, a melancholy yet undeniable fact that a number of human beings herded together for any considerable length of time will be sure to fall out, behaving in all probability rather less charitably than so many tigers and jackals. But on the whole, much as there was to lament in the matter of ruffled tempers and petty ways, the outward-bound vessel represented a perfect paradise during the four months’ voyage, compared with the ordeal of a similar period aboard a homeward-bound Indiaman. To give even a faint idea of the angry conflagration of passions by which the passengers in the latter were wont to distinguish themselves, one would have to borrow from the “Inferno” of Dante, and conjecture what must be going on in Pandemonium, where the evil spirits meet in council!