To complete the Sea Curse,--there are three Fates, and each had a boon for me at my birth--it was ordained that, like the great Nelson, I should never sail from fresh water into salt, without knowing it by a general rising and commotion, which might be called figuratively, a Mutiny at the Nore. Like the standing and sitting infirmity, it is incurable. On my voyage outwards I tried every popular recipe; the hard ones first, to wit, raw carrots, raw onions, sailors’ biscuit with Dutch cheese, hard-boiled eggs, hard dumplings, raw stockfish. Next the easy ones: namely, cream cheese, Welsh rabbits, maccaroni, very hasty pudding, and insupportable soup. Then the neutrals: such as chewed blotting-paper, dry oatmeal, pounded egg-shells, scraped chalk, and unbaked dough. To wash these down, I took, by prescription, tea without milk, coffee without sugar, bark without wine, water without brandy; and these formulæ all failing, I then tried them, as witches pray, backwards; brandy without water, wine without bark, and so forth. The experimental combinations followed; rum and milk, and mustard; eggs and wine, and camomile tea; gin and beer, and vinegar; sea-water and salad-oil, mulled, with sugar and nutmeg. Of which last, I drank by advice most prodigiously, the Doctors of the Marine College dispensing always on the Homœopathic principle, that a large dose of anything, whereof a little would set you wrong on the land, will set you right on the sea. I need hardly say that, with my predisposed _necessitarian_ viscera, all these infallible remedies failed of any effect, except to aggravate my case. Nothing short of liquid lead, maybe, or potable plaster of Paris, would have proved a settler. Happy the man who hath never been driven in his despair to test, detest, invoke, evoke, swallow, and unswallow, such drugs and draughts of the naval Pharmacopœia! Thrice happy civic simpleton who hath never learned how the rudder revolveth, at the risk of _turning round_ himself! Vandergroot is visibly in course of transformation. At every visit to the cabin he looks more and more like a Dutch-pin. He talks to me roundly, and gets blunter and blunter! The last time I felt, I had no small to my back. If I may guess at my own figure, it is now about an oval. I must look like one of Leda’s babies, just emerged, with their insignificant buds of legs and arms, from the egg! From an oval to a circle is but a step. Heaven help me when I get landed, round and sound, as they say of cherries! How shall I get home--how get up--(there will be a short way down)--mine own stairs? How shall I sit? Instead of my old library chair, I must borrow its three-legged stool of the terrestrial globe!