I walked aft to the companion hatch and entered the cuddy, or, as it is now called, the saloon. The apartment was the width of the ship, and was indeed a very splendid and spacious state-cabin, with a bulkhead at the extremity under the wheel, where the captain’s bedroom was, and a berth alongside of it, where the skipper worked out his navigation along with the officers, and where the midshipmen went to school. There were also two berths right forward close against the entrance to the cuddy by way of the quarter-deck, occupied by the first and second mates; otherwise, the interior was as clear as a ballroom, and it was like entering a brilliantly illuminated pavilion ashore, to pass out of the windy dusk of the night and the flying moonshine of it into the soft brightness of oil-flames burning in handsome lamps of white and gleaming metal, duplicated by mirrors, with hand-paintings between and polished panels in which the radiance cloudily rippled. A long table went down the centre of this cuddy, and over it were the domes of the skylights, in which were many plants and flowers of beauty swinging in pots, and globes of fish and silver swinging trays. Right through the heart of the interior came the shaft of the mizzen mast, rich with chiselled configurations, and of a delicate hue; a handsome piano stood lashed to the deck abaft the trunk of giant spar. The planks were finely carpeted, and sofas and arm-chairs ran the length of this glittering saloon on either side of it. There were a few people assembled at the fore-end of the table as I made my way to the hatch whose wide steps led to the sleeping berths below. It was not hard to perceive that one of them was an East Indian military gentleman whose liver was on fire through years of curry. His white whiskers of the wire-like inflexibility of a cat’s, stood out on either side his lemon-coloured cheeks; his little blood-shot eyes of indigo sparkled under overhanging brows where the hair lay thick like rolls of cotton-wool. This gentleman I knew to be Colonel Bannister, and as I cautiously made my way along--for the movements of the decks were staggering enough to oblige me to tread warily--I gathered that he was ridiculing the medical profession to Dr. Hemmeridge, the ship’s surgeon, for its inability to prescribe for sea-sickness. ‘It iss der nerves,’ I heard a fat Dutch gentleman say--afterwards known to me as Peter Hemskirk, manager of a firm in Bombay. ‘Nerves!’ sneered the colonel, with a glance at the Dutchman’s waistcoat. ‘Don’t you know the difference between the nerves and the stomach, sir?’ ‘Same thing,’ exclaimed Dr. Hemmeridge soothingly; ‘sea-sickness means the head, any way; and pray, colonel, what are the brains but’---- ‘Ha! ha!’ roared the colonel, interrupting him; ‘_there_ I have you. If it be the brains only which are affected, why, then, ha! ha! no wonder Mynheer here doesn’t suffer, though it’s his first voyage, he says.’