No one, unless he belongs to the cooking-staff, has much opportunity afforded him for prying into the galley on board a big passenger ship during working hours. Those splendidly-fitted hives of industry may be viewed at other times, but then they reveal nothing to the outsider. This exclusiveness is not malicious, or for fear of being found fault with. It is solely because there is no room for any but the workers, who work indeed. Every inch of space is needed. Look down through the hatch above, or peer in through the ports, and you will be astounded at the way in which the cooks are handling the food, how in a space where, by all ordinary rules of cookery, they should not have room to move, they are turning out with conjurer-like dexterity a state dinner of ever so many courses for a couple of hundred saloon passengers. And then contrast their surroundings, if your previous experience enables you so to do, with the palatial spaces of a grand hotel kitchen. Only, you must remember at the same time the gale raging over the wide sea, and the complicated movements indulged in by the ship as she strides over the tremendous waves. So shall you acquire a respect for the sea-cook that will endure all your days. To compare great things with small, this mental picture brings before me by association the cooks in the Australian coasting steamers. We have nothing like the same lavish arrangements for cooks and stewards on our own coasts, because our system is different. Here the fare is exclusive of food. You may dine or not as it suits your purse or your appetite. When you dine, you pay. But in the colonies the fare between ports includes sumptuous feeding arrangements for the first-class passenger, for the second--there are no third or deck passengers, as with us--rough accommodation, but an unlimited supply of excellent plain food. Australasia is truly the land of plentiful eating. And the cooks--well, they are good, some of them super-excellent, and all of them trained by hard experience to do much work in a very small compass and with a tiny staff. The cook of the _Wonga Wonga_ stands out boldly in my memory as one of the characteristic figures of my sea experience. A huge negro with a voice of thunder, and an effervescing humour that made him a prime favourite, he succeeded in his vocation where many a better man might have failed. He was a fairly good cook, but in his details of work reminded me strongly of the elderly negress in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," who dished up a dinner out of chaos and old night somewhere down below. Such an extraordinary jumble of pastry-making, poultry-trimming, and all the varied operations required in the preparation of a dinner was surely never seen. And out from the weird confusion of things Sam would burst, smeared with blood and grease and dusty with flour, brandishing a big knife and declaiming Shakespeare on the slightest provocation. But in spite of the fact that