A breeze was freshening, tufting the heaving billows with white crests and driving showers of spray and clots of foam upon the decks of the _Dunvegan_. Passengers stood in strained attitudes about the ship, fidgeting with the desire to be ill and the wish to appear comfortable--even dignified. In the end, however, circumstances were too strong for the passengers, transforming them, from a state of calm despair, into a condition of sickness and temporary dejection. Every one was perturbed, and those delicate attentions which the sea-sick demand were being offered by a much-worried deck steward. Here and there groups of more hardy voyagers were spending their feeble wit in unseasonable jokes; here and there bedraggled people, wet with spray and racked by the anguish of an aching void, were clutching at the possibility of gaining the privacy of their cabins before their feelings quite overpowered them. In this mad rush, not unlike the scramble of a shuttlecock to escape the buffetings of the battledore, I also joined, fetching my berth with much unfortunate sensation. Alas! I am a wretched sailor, and travelling far and near these many years, crossing strange seas to distant lands at oft-recurring periods, has not even tutored me to stand the stress of the ocean wave. I cannot endure the sea. The _Dunvegan Castle_ was steaming to the Cape, carrying the mails, together with a number of tedious and most tiresome people, whose hours aboard were passed in periods of distracting energy--in deck quoits, in impossible cricket matches, in angry squabbles upon the value of the monies which, day by day, were collected by the crafty from the foolish and pooled in prizes upon the daily run of the steamer. It was said that these were pleasant gambles, but the Gentiles paid and the Hebrews, returning to their diamonds, their stocks and shares, scooped the stakes. It is a way that the people of Israel and Threadneedle Street have made peculiarly their own; and, indeed, the multitude and variety of Jews upon this evil-smelling steamer suggested that she might have held within her walls the nucleus of an over-sea Israelitish colony, such another as the Rothschilds founded.