The passage across the “Great Atlantic Ferry” is now one of ease, and in the case of first‐class passengers almost luxury. How different was it about forty years ago, even on the best steamships of that period! Charles Dickens has graphically described his experiences on board the _Britannia_, one of the earliest of the Cunard fleet, in one of his least‐ read works(4)—at least in the present generation. The little cupboard dignified by the name of “state‐room;” the dingy saloon likened “to a gigantic hearse with windows in the sides;” the melancholy stove at which the forlorn stewards were rubbing their hands; the stewardess, whom Dickens blesses “for her piously fraudulent account of January voyages;” the excitement before leaving the dock; the captain’s boat and the dapper little captain; the last late mail bags, and the departure, are all sketched from nature, as the great novelist alone could depict them. And now they are off. “‘The sea! the sea! the open sea! That is the place where we all wish to be, Rolling about so merrily!’ So all sing and say, by night and by day, In the _boudoir_, the street, at the concert, and play, In a sort of coxcombical roundelay. You may roam through the City, transversely or straight, From Whitechapel turnpike to Cumberland Gate, And every young lady who thrums a guitar, Every mustachioed shopman who smokes a cigar, With affected devotion, promulgates his notion, Of being a “Rover” and “Child of the Ocean”— Whate’er their age, sex, or condition may be, They all of them long for the “Wide, wide sea!” But however they dote, only set them afloat, In any craft bigger at all than a boat, Take them down to the Nore, and you’ll see that before The “wessel” they “woyage” in has made half her way Between Shellness Point and the pier at Herne Bay, Let the wind meet the tide in the slightest degree, They’ll be all of them heartily sick of the sea!” So says “Ingoldsby,” and it is, no doubt, true of some London Jack Tars and Cheapside buccaneers, who, on leaving port, are much more nautically “got up” than any of the crew. These stage sailors become very limp when the sea‐water takes the starch out of them. Barham tells us of one Anthony Blogg:— “So I’ll merely observe, as the water grew rougher The more my poor hero continued to suffer, Till the sailors themselves cried, in pity, ‘Poor buffer!’”