A fat little lascar balanced himself in the jolly-boat outlined against the sky and held aloft a red flag until the hawser swung clear of the propeller, when he raised a white flag above him and stood as motionless as the Statue of Liberty, while the _Sutlej_ cleared Europa Point of Gibraltar and headed towards the East. Then he pattered across the deck and leaned over the side and crooned in a lazy, barbarous monotone to the waves. The sun fell upon the boat like a spell and turned us into sleepy and indolent fixtures wherever it first found us, and showed us the white-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada of Spain to the north, and the dim blue mountains of Africa to the south. The deck below was scrubbed as white as a bread-board, and the masts and rigging threw black shadows on the awning overhead, and on every side the blue Mediterranean and the bluer Mediterranean sky met and sparkled and reflected each other's brilliancy like mirrors placed face to face. For four days the sun greeted the _Sutlej_ by day and the moon by night, and the coast of Africa played hide-and-seek along her starboard side, disappearing in a white mist of cloud for an hour or so, and then running along with us again in comfortable proximity. On the other side boats passed at almost as frequent intervals, and at such friendly range that one could count the people on the decks and read their flag signals without a glass. The loneliness of the North Atlantic, where an iceberg stands for land, and only an occasional tramp steamer rests the eye, is as different to this sea as a railroad journey over the prairie is to the jaunt from New York to Washington. On the second night out we see Algiers, glowing and sparkling in the night like a million of fire-flies, and with the clear steady eye of the light-house warning us away, as though the quarantine had not warned some of us away already. And on the third night we pass Cape Bon, and can imagine Tunis lying tantalizingly near us, behind its light-house, shut off also by the quarantine that the cholera at Marseilles has made imperative wherever the French line of steamers touch. By this time the twoscore passengers have foregathered as they would never have done had they all been Americans, or had there been three hundred of them, and their place of meeting the deck of a transatlantic steamer instead of one of this picturesque fleet, upon which you expect strange things to happen. [Illustration: MALTESE PEDDLERS]