“Placed far amid the melancholy main,”

and now we are among our own tea-cups.  This is happiness enough for a cold winter’s night.  Mid-ocean, and mid tea-cups!  Stupendous change, let us tell you, worthy friend, who never yet set sail where sharks and other strange sea-cattle bob their noses above the brine,—­who never lived forty days in the bowels of a ship, unable to hold your head up to the captain’s bluff “good morning” or the steward’s cheery “good night.”  Sir Philip Sidney discourses of a riding-master he encountered in Vienna, who spoke so eloquently of the noble animal he had to deal with, that he almost persuaded Sir Philip to wish himself a horse.  We have known ancient mariners expatiate so lovingly on the frantic enjoyments of the deep sea, that very youthful listeners have for the time resolved to know no other existence.  If the author of the “Arcadia” had been permitted to become a prancing steed, he might, after the first exhilarating canter, have lamented his equine state.  How many a first voyage, begun in hilarious impatience, has caused a bitter repentance!  The sea is an overrated element, and we have nothing to say in its favor.  Because we are out of its uneasy lap to-night, we almost resemble in felicity Richter’s Walt, who felt himself so happy, that he was transported to the third heaven, and held the other two in his hand, that he might give them away.  To-morrow morning we shall not hear that swashing, scaring sound directly overhead on the wet deck, which has so often murdered our slumbers.  Delectable the sensation that we don’t care a rope’s-end “how many knots” we are going, and that our ears are so far away from that eternal “Ay, ay, Sir!” “The whales,” says old Chapman, speaking of Neptune, “exulted under him, and knew their mighty king.”  Let them exult, say we, and be blowed, and all due honor to their salt sovereign! but of their personal acquaintance we are not ambitious.  We have met them now and then in the sixty thousand miles of their watery playing-places we have passed over, and they are not pretty to look at.  Roll on, et cetera, et cetera,—­and so will we, for the present, at least, as far out of your reach as possible.

Yes, wise denizen of the Celestial Empire, it is a good, nay, a great thing, to return even to so small a home-object as an old tea-cup.  As we lift the bright brim to our so long absent lips, we repeat it.  As we pour out our second, our third, and our fourth, we say it again.  Ling Ching, you were right!

And now, as the rest of the household have all gone up bed-ward, and left us with their good-night tones,

  “Like flowers’ voices, if they could but speak,”