Oh how I wish from my soul of souls that I could see the Commodore of the Thames Yachts now pulling, within hail, in the Wenus! Or, the last Dibdin taking a chair--or the chair taking him--in this cabin! Or, Campbell essaying to write down a new sea-song on yon topsy-turvy table! And oh! to behold the author of “The deep deep Sea” sitting on the poop, singing to that floating Young Woman’s head and bust, taken by mistake for a mermaid’s! Another shout. Pieter Pietersoon, in heaving the lead, hath chucked himself in along with it! I do not wonder; he heaveth after my own fashion, by wholesale. Have I not within the last two hours rejected, discharged, and utterly cast from me in disgust, the whole ocean, nay all the oceans, German, Atlantic, Pacific--the Arctic last, its solid calms, the next best things to Terra Firma, not so violently disagreeing with me as the rest. And do I not know and feel that I am now about to give up Neptune, trident and all, with the whole salt-water mythology? I warrant, ere ten minutes to come, there shall not remain within me so much as a syren’s mirror, or her tortoise-shell comb:--not one solitary Triton will be left on my stomach. Some unsavoury odour about the cabin--marvellously like the smell of oil paint--hath just given me a new turn, by conjuring up all the nauseous pictures of marine allegories, which even on steady dry land, used to stir and provoke my spleen. Oh! that they were all here, President, R.A., and A.R.A., in a string, climbing after me up this perilous slippery stair, to the more perilous slippery deck, there to crawl on all-fours to the ship’s side, and clinging like cats or monkeys to the quarter boards, take a trembling peep at what Vandergroot calls “den wild zee!” What an awful sight! The tempest-tost sky is as troubled as the ocean: whilst betwixt the jagged base of the low black cloud, and the still jaggeder crest of the sea, the red angry lightning restlessly darts to and fro, as if in search of whatever presuming mortal dares fare between them! Oh tell me, Mister Elias Martin--if you a’nt dead--is the tossing crest of yonder mad black billow, that comes racing after us, at all like the black worsted fringe which your brethren are apt to hang on the necks of their marine Arabians? But hush, yonder comes Neptune himself, in his state-coach--aye, hats off--the wind hath taught ye manners. Lo! yonder he stands,--Pshaw! no, no, no,--Zounds! you are all gaping at honest Hans Vandergroot. Look to starboard--to the left hand! That’s the gentleman, without his castor, nor indeed overwell togged otherwise for wet weather--with his beard lather’d but not shaved--standing up in an oyster-shell drag, and attempting, like a sorry whip as he is, to tool his team of bokickers with a potato-fork. Did you ever see four such unbroke brutes as he hath to keep together--neither reined-up, nor down, nor indeed, any ribbons to hold at all--and as I would have