I am surprised that this route is not more popular with the increasing numbers of our people who like a short run to the south of France in our hard spring weather. You can get by this way to Bordeaux quicker than you can by Dover or Folkestone from any place north of Trent, unless you travel day and night, and sleep on the trains, and for about half the money. The packets are cargo-boats, but with excellent cabins and sleeping accommodation for twelve or fourteen passengers, including as good a bath as on a Cunard or White Star liner. And yet I was the only passenger last week. There can scarcely be a more interesting short voyage for any one who is a decent sailor; but I suppose the fourteen or sixteen hours “in the Bay of Biscay, oh!” scares people. As far as my experience goes, the Atlantic roars like a sucking-dove in the Channel and the Bay at Easter-time. There was not wind enough to dimple the ocean surface, and until we passed Milford Haven, no perceptible motion on the ship. Then, as we crossed the opening of the Bristol Channel, she began to roll--quite unaccountably, as it seemed at first; but on watching carefully, one became aware that, though the surface was motionless, the great deep beneath was heaving with long pulsations from the west, which lifted us in regular cadence every thirty or forty seconds. I have often crossed the Atlantic, but never seen the like, as always before there has been a ripple on the calmest day, which gave the effect, at any rate, of surface motion. The best idea I can give of it is, if on a long stretch of our South Downs the successive turf slopes took to rising and falling perpendicularly every minute. The Captain said there must have been wild weather out west, and these were the rollers. It was a grand sight to watch the great heave pass on till it reached the Land’s End, and ran up the cliffs there. We passed near enough to see the mining works, close to the level of high-tide, and the villages on the cliff-tops above, or clinging on to the slopes wherever these were not too precipitous. One can realise what manner of men and sailors this Ear West has bred of old, and, I hope, still breeds. I pity the Englishman whose pulse does not quicken as he sails by the Land’s End, and can see with a glass some of the small harbours out of which Drake and Frobisher and Hawkins sailed, and drew the crews that followed and fought the Armada right away to the Straits of Dover.