The reader may be inclined to think that this was no great hardship; but I hope you will not take it amiss, if I say that this shows your entire ignorance of the matter. Only consider for a moment, and you will, I am persuaded, come to a very different conclusion. Take for your dinner a salt herring, or a piece of beef that has been perhaps a twelvemonth in the brine, in a very hot summer day, having ate no breakfast beforehand, and try if you would find an English pint of water sufficient even for the afternoon; but what is a single day when the body is full of moisture? Continue this experiment for three weeks or a month, and I am fully satisfied you will change your tone.--Let me tell you, my dear reader, that I never knew the meaning of that passage of the Psalmist, "Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth," before that time; but after lying in my hammock, in the hallop deck, a few hours, (sleeping it could never be called,) amongst two hundred men and upwards, without, I may say, one breath of air, and when the heat was such as to melt the sealing wax I had in my chest--I say, after a person had remained in that state, and in such a place for a few hours, it was hardly possible to articulate a word. You will allow we must have been ill indeed before we could have chosen to be without any victuals cooked for us an entire fortnight. But this was literally the case in the mess to which I belonged. Some of these miserable creatures were so carried away by their intolerable thirst, as to draw up the salt water, in a tin pot, each anxiously waiting his turn to swallow the nauseous draught. This to be sure was making things worse. The consequence of all this was, we had at one time one hundred and thirty-two men on the doctor's list, with sea-scurvy and sores. You will think it strange that we could live at all after so long wanting victuals. I answer, we had a certain quantity of biscuit served out to us, all the colours of the rainbow; and I am sure the pint of water, which we had every day at twelve o'clock, would, from taste and smell, have turned the stomach of any person who had never known any thing of this extremity. A person possessed of the best eyes in the ship could not see to the bottom of a tea-cup full of it, had he got it to himself for his trouble, which would have been the greatest reward that could have been offered to him. You may think I am going to say too much, but I say it with a clear conscience, that in this state of torment I would have cheerfully suffered the _pain_ of drowning, (but not to be drowned outright, mind ye,) for a bellyful of water; and often, in my troubled slumbers, did I imagine myself plunging and struggling in the waters of the Tweed, and I "dreamed, that behold I was drinking, but when I awoke, behold I was faint, and my soul had appetite." My dear reader, I pray to God that you may never experience this extremity, for the pain of hunger, which