I am adding these few last lines in lead pencil to my great pacquet in haste, since Mr Fraser assures me that once past Beachy Head we shall find ourselves in rough water. I can’t at present call myself indisposed, though I am not quite at my ease, as I ought to be, since Mr Fraser says the wind is so light as to be almost a calm. The space on board is very much confined, particularly since the decks are still lumbered up with all kinds of packages, but I learn that these will before long be stowed away below. Pray, my dear friend, pardon these seaman’s phrases. My head is too confused to remember the correct terms. You would smile to see how we are all lodged here, the gentlemen in the great cabin, on shelves like those in a draper’s shop, and only large enough to hold a small mattress, and we in another apartment, similarly furnished. There are two ladies on board besides ourselves, but neither of them young, and both married, and about a dozen gentlemen. I had intended to write something of the day and a half since we left Deal, but find that the end of my paper is all but reached. You shall receive a long letter by the first opportunity that offers of sending one. Adieu, my dearest, dearest Emily.[1.12] Rest assured that you was ever in my thoughts from the moment of our parting. CHAPTER II. IN WHICH IS SET FORTH THE INCONSTANCY OF MAN. _Hon. Co.’s Ship Orford_, Fonchial[2.01] Harbour, _Dec. ye_ 31_st._ Since despatching my first letter to my Amelia by the hands of the pilot, I have passed through such an experience as I should not care to repeat. Ah, my dear, we thought it at school a simple thing to hear that Britain is an island, but ’tis a fact one learns to appreciate when it is being fixed in one’s mind by a sea-voyage. For over three weeks, my dearest friend, was your Sylvia pent up in the narrow floating prison which is called the ladies’ cabin, enduring, for the greater part of the time, such protracted torments as she could not have dreamed the human frame would be able to support. You may smile to hear that I had willingly relinquished all the future glories of Bengall, and even the hope of a meeting with my papa, for the sake of a grave on dry land, where, at least, there would be no more shaking and tumbling, but had the exchange been offered me, I don’t dare say that I would not have accepted it gladly. Imagine, my Amelia, your unfortunate friend confined with four other females in a narrow chamber lighted only by a ship’s lantern (for the weather was so bad that the ports, by which is signified the small windows of the vessel, were forced to be closed), each extended on a wooden shelf about the size, so I should think, of a coffin. To the sufferings caused by illness, add the terrors of a storm, when the hatches were battened down, as they say (this means that heavy coverings were fastened over the only openings by which light and air can visit the lower decks,