Going to sea in the sixties was a very different matter from going to sea nowadays. At present you step on board a huge floating hotel, with all the comforts and most of the luxuries of the best London establishments, finding innumerable well-dressed stewards to attend to every want, while your comfortable though small cabin is provided with everything necessary. Then again the cold storage chamber furnishes the table with fresh meat, game, poultry, fish and ice for every meal. While in those days you were accommodated with an empty square cell lighted by a dim port hole, this chamber being called a state-room, and you could furnish it to your fancy at your own expense. Then as regards the commissariat, here there was a great difference--no ice, no cooling drinks, no well-filled menu--true a number of sheep, pigs and poultry were carried, but these rarely lasted out the voyage, and in our case a heavy gale we ran up against in the North Atlantic deprived us of most of ours, and I have frequently seen the steward and cabin boy washed into the lee scuppers, together with the dinner they were conveying aft to the cuddy, from the galley that was located abaft the foremast. Again at the present time you know to the day, even to the hour, when you will reach your destination, while then you did not even know, to the month, when you would get there. Still I loved the old wind-jamming days, and can look back to many a jolly hour lazed away on the breezy decks of the old _Queen Bee_. Our saloon passengers consisted of an old major, going out to take up a grant of land and settle in New Zealand; three or four young subs. just off the barrack square, _en route_ to join their regiments; and eight young fellows who, as the old song runs: “Had played in the eleven, or pulled five or six or seven in the ‘Varsity or else their college boat,” who were going out to learn sheep farming; at least, poor lads, they thought so. In the ’tween decks were one hundred and twenty single women sent out under the ægis and, I believe, at the expense of Miss Burdett-Coutts, and in the fore part of the ship were some forty Tommies and twenty male emigrants, so she had the makings of a very gay ship. I am not, however, going to write a history of that voyage, as a good many of the incidents that took place on board would not bear telling, as they were very gay, and as regards the passage itself nothing very startling took place. We met two very severe gales, but weathered them safely, only losing one boat and two topsails, blown to rags, and we also passed close to a large raft, but as there was nothing on it we did not stop to examine it, so after a passage of one hundred and eighteen days we dropped anchor in the beautiful harbour of Wellington on the 10th January 1866, and were very glad to get our feet on dry land once more.