MY DEAREST PAM, I got William to write to you from the Cape, as we were in a flurry of writing, visiting, and surveying Africa, and he had more time, having been there before. We have had a very smooth sea, and I can read and draw and write, and as we all are perfectly well, there is not much to complain of, except of the actual disease--a long voyage, which is a very bad illness in itself, but we have had it in the mildest form and with every possible mitigation. At the same time I cannot spare you the detail of all our hardships, and I know you will shudder to hear that last Saturday, the fifth day of a dead calm, not a cloud visible, and the Master threatening three weeks more of the same weather, the thermometer at 86 in the cabin,--tempers on the go and meals more than ever the important points of life,--at this awful crisis the Steward announced that the coffee and orange-marmalade were both come to an end. No wonder the ship is so light, we have actually ate it a foot out of the water since we left the Cape. “Nasty Beasts,” as Liston says. Your lively imagination will immediately guess how bad the butter is, and I mention the gratifying fact that two small pots of Guava Jelly and the N.E. Monsoon sprung up on Monday, and we hope their united forces may carry us to the Sandheads. I never could like a sea life, nor do I believe that anybody does, but with all our grumbling about ours, we could not have been 19 weeks at sea, with so few inconveniences. Captain Grey is an excellent seaman, and does more of the work of his ship than is usual. The officers and midshipmen have acted several times for our diversion, and remarkably well. The serious drama, _Ella Rosenberg_, was enough to kill one. Ella’s petticoats were so short, and her cap with her plaits of oakum always would fall off when she fainted away, and a tall Quartermaster, who acted the confidant, would call her Hella, and never caught her in time! Some of the sailors were heard talking over the officers’ acting, and saying, “They do low comedy pretty well, but they do not understand how to act the gentleman at all.” How little we thought in old Grosvenor Street days, when we sat at the little window listening to the organ-man playing “Portrait charmant” while the carriage was adjusting itself at the door, that we should be parted in such an out-_sea_-ish sort of way. That in the middle of February, when we ought to be shivering in a thick yellow fog, George and I should be established on a pile of cushions in the stern window of his cabin, he without his coat, waistcoat, and shoes, learning Hindoostanee by the sweat of his brow. I, with only one petticoat and a thin dressing-gown on, a large fan in one hand and a pen in the other, and neither of us able to attend to our occupations because my little black spaniel will yap at us, to make us look at the shark which is playing “Portrait charmant” to two little pilot-fish close under the window.