succeeds another, with only an occasional variation in the way of a head wind or a flurry of snow.  Time, of course, hangs heavily on our hands.  We are waked about half-past seven in the morning by the second mate, a funny, phlegmatic Dutchman, who is always shouting to us to “turn out” and see an imaginary whale, which he conjures up regularly before breakfast, and which invariably disappears before we can get on deck, as mysteriously as “Moby Dick.”  The whale, however, fails to draw after a time, and he resorts to an equally mysterious and eccentric sea-serpent, whose wonderful appearance he describes in comical broken English with the vain hope that we will crawl out into the raw foggy atmosphere to look at it.  We never do.  Bush opens his eyes, yawns, and keeps a sleepy watch of the breakfast table, which is situated in the captain’s cabin forward.  I cannot see it from my berth, so I watch Bush.  Presently we hear the humpbacked steward’s footsteps on the deck above our heads, and, with a quick succession of little bumps, half a dozen boiled potatoes come rolling down the stairs of the companionway into the cabin.  They are the forerunners of breakfast.  Bush watches the table, and I watch Bush more and more intently as the steward brings in the eatables; and by the expression of Bush’s face, I judge whether it be worth while to get up or not.  If he groans and turns over to the wall, I know that it is only hash, and I echo his groan and follow his example; but if he smiles, and gets up, I do likewise, with the full assurance of fresh mutton-chops or rice curry and chicken.  After breakfast the Major smokes a cigarette and looks meditatively at the barometer, the captain gets his old accordion and squeezes out the Russian National Hymn, while Bush and I go on deck to inhale a few breaths of pure fresh fog, and chaff the second mate about his sea-serpent.  In reading, playing checkers, fencing, and climbing about the rigging when the weather permits, we pass away the day, as we have already passed away twenty and must pass twenty more before we can hope to see land.

  AT SEA, NEAR THE ALEUTIAN ISLANDS.
  August 6, 1865.

“Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground, ling, heath, broom, furze, anything,” except this wearisome monotonous waste of water!  Let Kamchatka be what it will, we shall welcome it with as much joy as that with which Columbus first saw the flowery coast of San Salvador.  I am prepared to look with complacency upon a sandbar and two spears of grass, and would not even insist upon the grass if I could only be sure of the sand-bar.  We have now been thirty-four days at sea without once meeting a sail or getting a glimpse of land.