It is quite a pleasure in this censorious world to see any man absolutely blind to his wife's faults, and thoroughly awake to her good qualities. The opinion formed of Peggy--by Mrs Massey and Mrs Hayward respectively, did not quite coincide with that of John Mitford. "How did you get on with poor Peggy last night, Eva?" asked Dr Hayward of his wife, in an undertone, as they breakfasted that forenoon beside the tiller, while the rest of their companions were similarly engaged in the middle of the boat, and at the bow. "Pretty well, Tom, but she's troublesome to manage. She is so unusually timid, poor creature, so prone to give way to despair when things look bad, yet so sweetly apt to bound into high spirits when things are looking hopeful,--and withal, so amusingly garrulous!" Strange to say, at the very moment that this was uttered, Nellie was remarking to her husband in a low tone that, "poor Peggy was quite a puzzle, that she was all but dead at one moment, and quite lively at another, that she professed to be all submission, but was as obstinate as a pig, and that her tongue--soft though it was--went like the clapper of a mill!" We have referred to breakfast, but the meal spread before the castaways hardly merits that name, for it consisted of only a small slice of pork to each; a few pieces of ship's biscuit that Slag had discovered in his pockets; and a cup of water drawn from the pond which had accumulated in a hollow of the tarpaulin during the night. "It is lucky that one of the pieces of pork happened to be cooked," observed Dr Hayward, as he served out the allowance, "for I would have been sorry to break into the preserved meat tins till forced to do so. We must keep these as a reserve as long as possible." "Right you are, sir!" said Slag, with his mouth full, while with a clasp-knife he carefully cut off another morsel to be ready, "right you are! That 'minds me when we was starvin', me and my shipmates in the Arctic regions, so as our ribs was all but comin' through our skins, an' we was beginnin' to cast an evil eye on the stooard who'd kep' fatter than the rest of us somehow, an' was therefore likely to prove a more satisfyin' kind o' grub, d'ee see--" "I say, Joe," said Hayward, interrupting, for he feared that Slag's anecdote might not tend to render the pork breakfast more palatable. "Sir?" said Slag. "Will you just go to the bow and take a squint ahead? I think there seems to be something like an end o' the cliffs in view--your eyes are better than mine." Slag swallowed the mouthful on which he was engaged, thrust after it the morsel that was ready to follow, wiped the clasp-knife on his thigh, and went forward to "take a squint." It turned out that the "end" of the cliffs which the doctor had only supposed possible, was a reality, for, after a long gaze, Slag turned and said-- "Your eyes are better than you think, sir, for the end o' the cliff is visible, an' a spit o' sand beyond is quite plain."