The boisterous mirth arising from the cabin below seemed strangely out of place. I turned to the man at the helm; the idiot seemed as screwed as the wheel that rolled in his slackened grasp. “Holloa, mate!” I said, “what is that light on the water you are steering for?” pointing to a flame I saw gleaming there. “A tar-barrel,” he said, “some chaps passing the line have chucked overboard.” “But it is nearing us too fast for that--look out, man! Good God! its a ship!--luff, luff!” and suiting the action to the word, I jumped to the wheel and jammed the helm down; then swiftly glided by a huge black hull, its deck crowded with dusky figures, shouting and gesticulating to us like demons, its stern grazing our quarter, as the good ship Arethusa, like a form endowed with life, sprang up into the wind, and saved herself from destruction. One second more and we had been down, down amongst the dead men, not far from poor Ben. Up rushed the startled convivialists from below, some with their glasses still in hand, and I crept ’neath the bulwarks, and kneeling, felt a mother’s prayer had been heard that night on my behalf. This vessel proved to be the Mauritius, a large iron screw, then bound on her first voyage to India round the Cape. She was afterwards one of the fleet of transports placed under my orders for the conveyance of troops to the Crimea, an account of which will shortly appear in my military correspondence concerning that war. This narrow squeak sobered us for a few days, but our spirits revived as the western winds now began to blow. The frigate-hawk--a truly wonderful bird for its powers of flight--came often to pay us a visit, and changed the monotony of continually looking into the sea for beings endowed with life. I might have shot one or two, and had the head of my rifle more than once on their bodies, as they floated overhead without a quiver in their outspread wings; but such aerial life I did not like to see streaked with blood, so I left them alone in their boundless home, instead of sending them to a glass cage in the British Museum. Of shark, bonito, and other scaly-looking denizens of the sea, there had been often exciting scenes of what some called sport, but I must say I never could see much fun in it. I certainly should have liked to have had a go-in with a vicious-looking shark on fair terms, but then I was most undeniably afraid of him in the water, and on the deck of our ship he was no match for me; so, before I had seen two such hooked monsters hauled on board and butchered with spears and knives, I used to feel rather disgusted than otherwise with such displays.