"Well, you know, nothing could be better for a good understanding and high spirits amongst us than a fast course, fine weather, and entering the tropics. As for the tropics, if you have only a roomy ship and a good run of wind, as we had, in those latitudes, everything outside of you seems almost to have double the stuff in it that air and water have in other places; while _inside_ of one, again, one felt twice the life he had before, and everybody else came out _newer_ a good deal than on the parlour-rug at home. As the days got each hotter than the last, and the sea bluer and bluer, we began to think better of the heavy old _Seringapatam's_ pace, teak though she was, and her sole good point right before the wind. Every night she lighted her binnacle sooner, till deuce the bit of twilight there was, and the dark sky came down on us like the extinguisher over a candle. However, the look of things round and aloft made full amends for it, as long as we held the "Trades"; old Neptune shifting his scenes there so quickly, that nobody missed getting weather and air, more than he could help, were it only a sight how the Indiaman got on, without trouble to any living soul save the man at the wheel, as one long, big, bright wave shoved her to another, and the slower they rose the more business she seemed to do of herself. By the time they had furbished her up at their leisure, the _Seringapatam_ had a queer Eastern style, too, throughout; with her grass mattings and husky _coir_ chafing-gear, the yellow varnish about her, and her three topsails of country canvas, cut narrow towards the head--bamboo stu'nsail booms, and spare bits of bamboo always ready for everything; besides the bilious-like gold-coloured patches here and there in the rest of her sails, and the outlandish figure-head, that made you sometimes think there might be twenty thousand of them under the bows, dancing away with her like Juggernaut's travelling pagoda.