"Ah!" said Mrs. Cummings, "I am sure there is no such thing in his majesty's ships, as sailors knowing chess or any of those hard things that are enough to set one crazy to think of. In my own dear country, people are saving of their wits; but you Americans always know more of everything than you ought to. I don't wonder so few of you look plump and ruddy. You all wear yourselves out with head-work. Your eyes are not half so big as ours, for they are fairly sunk in your heads with thinking and contriving. To be sure, at our house in the Minories we always kept a pack of cards in the parlour closet. But we never played any but very easy games, for it was not our way to make a toil of pleasure. Mercy on me!--what a rock!--I wish I was at the Back of St. Clements--How I have seen the Potheridge family in Throgmorton street, ponder and study over a game of whist as if their lives depended on every card. I had to play whist whenever I drank tea there, for they were never satisfied unless they were at it every night; and I hated it, because I always happened to get old Miss Nancy for a partner, and she was so sharp and so cross, and was continually finding fault with me for something she called reneaging. Whenever I gave out that I was one by honours, she always said it was no such thing; and she downright scolded, when after she had played an ace I played a king; or when she had trumped first and I made all sure by trumping too. Now what I say is this--a trick can't be too well taken. But I'm not for whist--give me a good easy game where you can't go wrong, such as I've been used to all my life; though, no doubt when I get to America, I shall find my son Jacky playing chess and whist and despising Beggar my neighbour." In less than a fortnight after we left the British Channel, we were off the Banks of Newfoundland; and, as is frequently the case in their vicinity, we met with cold foggy weather. It cleared a little about seven in the morning, and we then discovered no less than three ice-bergs to leeward. One of them, whose distance from us was perhaps a mile, appeared higher than the mainmast head, and as the top shot up into a tall column, it looked like a vast rock with a light-house on its pinnacle. As the cold and watery sunbeams gleamed fitfully upon it, it exhibited in some places the rainbow tints of a prism--other parts were of a dazzling white, while its sharp angular projections seemed like masses of diamonds glittering upon snow. The fog soon became so dense, that in looking over the side of the ship we could not discern the sea. Fortunately, it was so calm that we scarcely moved, or the danger of driving on the ice-bergs would have been terrific. We had now no other means of ascertaining our distance from them, but by trying the temperature of the water with a thermometer.