variety; and as a result, the ship is bright and cheery to the eye, and this cheeriness invades one’s spirit and contents it. To fully appreciate the force and spiritual value of this radiant and opulent dream of colour, one must stand outside at night in the pitch dark and the rain, and look in through a port, and observe it in the lavish splendour of the electric lights. The old-time ships were dull, plain, graceless, gloomy, and horribly depressing. They compelled the blues; one could not escape the blues in them. The modern idea is right: to surround the passenger with conveniences, luxuries, and abundance of inspiriting colour. As a result, the ship is the pleasantest place one can be in, except, perhaps, one’s home. A VANISHED SENTIMENT One thing is gone, to return no more for ever—the romance of the sea. Soft sentimentality about the sea has retired from the activities of this life, and is but a memory of the past, already remote and much faded. But within the recollection of men still living, it was in the breast of every individual; and the further any individual lived from salt water the more of it he kept in stock. It was as pervasive, as universal, as the atmosphere itself. The mere mention of the sea, the romantic sea, would make any company of people sentimental and mawkish at once. The great majority of the songs that were sung by the young people of the back settlements had the melancholy wanderer for subject, and his mouthings about the sea for refrain. Picnic parties, paddling down a creek in a canoe when the twilight shadows were gathering, always sang Homeward bound, homeward bound From a foreign shore; and this was also a favourite in the West with the passengers on sternwheel steamboats. There was another— My boat is by the shore, And my bark is on the sea, But before I go, Tom Moore, Here’s a double health to thee. And this one, also— Oh, pilot, ’tis a fearful night, There’s danger on the deep. And this— A life on the ocean wave, And a home on the rolling deep, Where the scattered waters rave, And the winds their revels keep! And this— A wet sheet and a flowing sea, And a wind that follows fair. And this— My foot is on my gallant deck, Once more the rover is free! And the ‘Larboard Watch’—the person referred to below is at the masthead, or somewhere up there— Oh, who can tell what joy he feels, As o’er the foam his vessel reels, And his tired eyelids slumb’ring fall, He rouses at the welcome call Of ‘Larboard watch—ahoy!’ Yes, and there was for ever and always some jackass-voiced person braying out— Rocked in the cradle of the deep, I lay me down in peace to sleep!