A well-selected library, which is a great luxury at sea, and like most luxuries very rare, does wonders toward lessening this evil; but it is still far from constituting a _panacea_. I know not how it is, unless the patient begins in reality to suspect that he is taking _reading_ as a prescription against the foe, and converting his volumes into pill boxes--which by and by gets to be too painfully the truth--but the appetite soon becomes sated, the mind wearied, and the most fascinating and favourite authors "pall upon the sense" with a tiresome familiarity. Reading becomes hateful, for the very reason that it has become necessary. Amusements are exhausted, invented, changed, varied, and again exhausted. Every thing upon which the attention fixes itself, vainly wooing something novel, soon becomes insipid. Chess, back-gammon, letter-writing, journalizing, smoking, eating, drinking, and sleeping, may at first contribute not a little to the discomfiture of old Time, who walks the _sea_ shod with leaden sandals. The last three enumerated items, however, generally hold out to the last undisabled. But three Wellingtons could not have won Waterloo unsupported; nor, able and doughty as are these bold three--much as they prolong the combat--manfully as they fight, can they hold good their ground for ever; the obstinate, scythe-armed warrior, with his twenty-four body guards following him like his shadow, will still maintain the broadest portion of his diurnal territory, over which, manoeuvre as they may, these discomfited worthies cannot extend their front. Few situations are less enviable, than that of the worn voyager, as day after day "drags its slow length along," presenting to his restless, listless eyes, as he stretches them wearily over the leaden waste around him--the same unbroken horizon, forming the periphery of a circle, of which his vessel seems to be the immovable and everlasting centre--the same blue, unmeaning skies above--the same blue sea beneath and around--the same gigantic tracery of ropes and spars, whose fortuitous combinations of strange geometrical figures he has demonstrated, till they are as familiar as the diagrams on a turtle's back to an alderman; and the same dull white sails, with whose patches he has become as familiar as with the excrescences and other innocent defects upon the visages of his fellow-sufferers.