But you’ll demand some account of our voyage since I last put pen to paper in the Madeiras. Alas, my Amelia, your Sylvia is a sad lazy girl! And yet, how could it engage your interest to hear that for so many days we lay becalmed off the coasts of Guinea, and at other times met baffling winds that threw us out of our course, and on a very few occasions found ourselves making good progress with the aid of a favouring breeze? or that we touched at Ascension Island, and waited there while the seamen catched twenty great turtles for us to take on board--horrid sprawling creatures, and their fat _green_ when it is cooked? But all these delays, you’ll say, afforded me only the more time for writing to you. True, my dear, but what should be the subject? My beloved girl knows that I love her, and to waste paper in repeating assurances of that would be to outdo even a lover’s folly. When the history of one day is told, you have ’em all. Know then that the mornings have been spent seated under the awning on deck, we ladies with our embroidery at hand, to give us a decent semblance of industry, but really occupied in watching for distant sails, or the sight of land, or flying-fishes, or a change of wind, or any of the important nothings that appear of so much moment to the traveller on board ship. The gentlemen, meanwhile, busy themselves in fishing for creatures with such odd names as albacores, bonitoes, and doradoes, catching the smaller ones with hooks and lines, and the larger with fish-gigs or harpoons, in the casting of which Mr Fraser is particularly skilful. There are also many birds which venture near enough to the vessel to be caught, as albatrosses (but these the seamen protect, through some sentiment of superstition), tropic-birds, which are about the size of a hawk, with one extravagantly long feather in the tail, and booties and noddies, whose names (so Mr Fraser says, but I’m sure I can’t see how) express their natural foolishness. The afternoon is passed like the morning, unless one of the gentlemen be so obliging as to deprive himself of the excitement of fishing in order to read aloud to us females as we work. Then comes the evening, when there’s really nothing in the world to do (owing to the dimness of the lights provided for us below), but remain on deck and watch the sea, which indeed shows the strangest and most extraordinary fiery ripples and waves, unless the captain think fit to call up one of the seamen that plays the fiddle, and bid us set to for a dance. But this is rarely more than once a-week, and we call such occasions our assembly nights, when we dress ourselves with more attention than at other times, and the gentlemen wear their wigs, or have their hair curled and powdered.