at the smallest joke.  I pass as a wit with G., and have a great success.  She is going to stay with a married sister for the cold weather.  Quite like me, only I’m going to an unmarried brother.  I think we are both getting slightly impertinent to our elders.  They tease us so at meals in the saloon we have to answer back in self-defence, and it is very difficult to help trying to be smart; sometimes, at least with me, it degenerates into rudeness.  I told you about all the people at our table, but I forgot one—­a very aged man with a long white beard, rather like the evil magician in the fairy tales, but most harmless.  “Old Sir Thomas Erpingham,” I call him, for I am sure a good soft pillow for that good grey head were better than the churlish turf of India.  He is very kind, and calls us Sunshine and Brightness, and pays us the most involved Early Victorian compliments, which we, talking and laughing all the time, seldom ever hear, and it is left to kind Mrs. Wilmot to respond.

Nov. 7.

Last night we had an excitement.  We got into a thick fog and had to stand still and hoot, while something—­a homeward-bound steamer, they say—­nearly ran us down.  The people sleeping on deck said it was most awesome, but I slept peacefully through it until awakened by an American female running down the corridor and remarking at the top of a singularly piercing voice, “Wal, I am scared!”

To-day it is beautifully calm and bright; the nasty, hot, damp wind has gone; and we are sitting in our own little corner of the deck, Mrs. Crawley, Mrs. Wilmot, G., and I, sometimes reading, sometimes writing, very often talking.  It is luck for us to have two such charming women to talk to.  Mrs. Crawley is supposed to be my chaperon, I believe I forgot to tell you that.  Boggley, who is a great friend of hers, wrote and asked her to look after me.  How clever of him to fix on one in every way so desirable!  Suppose he had asked the Candle!

We have such splendid talks about books.  Mrs. Wilmot has, I think, read everything that has been written, also she is very keen about poetry and has my gift—­or is it a vice?—­of being able to say great pieces by heart, so between us G. is sometimes just a little bored.  You see, G. hasn’t been brought up in a bookish atmosphere and that makes such a difference.  The other night she was brushing her hair, unusually silent and evidently thinking deeply.  At last she looked up at me in my bunk, with the brush in her hand and all her hair swept over one shoulder, and said in the most puzzled way, “What was that nasty thing Mrs. Wilmot was saying all about dead women?” and do you know what she objected to?

  “Dear dead women, with such hair, too—­
    What’s become of all the gold
  Used to hang and brush their bosoms?  I
    Feel chilly and grown old.”