It took a couple of days to arrange our little cabin Penates; to discover who was on board; and a couple of days, too, to become aware, in spite of sudden starts of anxiety, that there was no post, and could be none; that one could not be wanted, or, if one was wanted, found and caught; and it was not till the fourth morning that the glorious sense of freedom dawned on the mind, as through the cabin port the sunrise shone in, yellow and wild through flying showers, and great north-eastern waves raced past us, their heads torn off in spray, their broad backs laced with ripples, and each, as it passed, gave us a friendly onward lift away into the ’roaring forties,’ as the sailors call the stormy seas between 50 and 40 degrees of latitude.

These ‘roaring forties’ seem all strangely devoid of animal life—­at least in a December north-east gale; not a whale did we see—­only a pair of porpoises; not a sea-bird, save a lonely little kittiwake or two, who swung round our stern in quest of food:  but the seeming want of life was only owing to our want of eyes; each night the wake teemed more bright with flame-atomies.  One kind were little brilliant sparks, hurled helpless to and fro on the surface, probably Noctilucae; the others (what they may be we could not guess at first) showed patches of soft diffused light, paler than the sparks, yet of the same yellow-white hue, which floated quietly past, seeming a foot or two below the foam.  And at the bottom, far beneath, deeper under our feet than the summit of the Peak of Teneriffe was above our heads—­for we were now in more than two thousand fathoms water—­what exquisite forms might there not be? myriads on myriads, generations on generations, people the eternal darkness, seen only by Him to whom the darkness is as light as day:  and to be seen hereafter, a few of them—­but how few—­when future men of science shall do for this mid-Atlantic sea-floor what Dr. Carpenter and Dr. Wyville Thomson have done for the North Atlantic, and open one more page of that book which has, to us creatures of a day, though not to Him who wrote it as the Time-pattern of His timeless mind, neither beginning nor end.

So, for want of animal life to study, we were driven to study the human life around us, pent up there in our little iron world.  But to talk too much of fellow-passengers is (though usual enough just now) neither altogether fair nor kind.  We see in travel but the outside of people, and as we know nothing of their inner history, and little, usually, of their antecedents, the pictures which we might sketch of them would be probably as untruthfully as rashly drawn.  Crushed together, too, perforce, against each other, people are apt on board ship to make little hasty confidences, to show unawares little weaknesses, which should be forgotten all round the moment they step on shore and return to something like a normal state of society.  The wisest and most humane rule for a traveller toward his companion is to