On board, besides ourselves, were some very funny people, and some merely funny. A swarthy family of Spaniards next us passed through all the successive shades of yellow and green, but throughout they were gay, eating oranges and chanting pretty little Castilian folk-songs. At table sat a man wearing a black and white striped shirt, of the variety known as “boiled,” a black and white striped collar of a different pattern, and a bright blue necktie thickly studded with daisies and asterisks. He looked, otherwise, like a burglar without his jimmy, especially when we saw him by moonlight glowering prognathously through a porthole. He turned out to be only a playwright and journalist, with a specialty for handing out misinformation on a different subject each meal. The stout lady, the flirtatious purser--why is he of all classes of men the most amorous?--the bounder, the bride and groom, the flappers of both sexes, the drummer, the motherly stewardess and the sardonic steward were all present. And why does the sight of digestive anguish bring out the maternal in the female, and only profanity in the male? Our plump English stewardess cooed over us, helpless in upper and lower berths; our steward always rocked with silent mirth, and muttered, “My God!” Our own stout lady was particularly rare. She appeared coquettishly the first calm day off Florida, in a pink gingham dress, a large black rosary draped prominently upon her,--which did not much heighten her resemblance to a Mother Superior, owing to her wearing an embroidered Chinese kimona and a monkey coat over it, and flirting so gayly with the boys. On the Galveston train later, we heard her say helplessly, “Porter, my trunk is follering me to Gal_ves_ton. How shall I stop it?” She could have stopped an express van merely by standing in front of it, but we did not suggest this remedy. The picture of a docile Saratoga lumbering doggedly at her rear was too much for words. As to the purser, we left him severely alone. We did not feel we could flirt with him in the style to which he had been accustomed. The last night of the voyage, when the clear bright green of the Gulf of Mexico gave place to the turbulent coffee color of the Mississippi, our stewardess knocked. “On account of the river, miss, we don’t bathe tonight.” It was a small tragedy for us. Earlier in the voyage we could not bear to see the water sliding up and down in the tub,--so much else was sliding up and down. It was on one of those days that the stewardess informed us that there were “twenty-seven ladies sick on this deck, to say nothing of twenty-four below,” and asked us how we would like a little piece of bacon. We firmly refused the bacon, but the Gilbertian lilt of her remark inspired us to composing a ballad with the refrain, “Twenty-seven sea-sick ladies we.”