It’s all tres bien (very well) but how the deuce can you be funny in the Baltic?  Why call it Baltic?  For days and nights at sea, sometimes up, more often down, and a sense of inability coming over me in the middle of the boundless deep.  Alas, poor YORICK!

Then breakfast.  Then lunch.  Then dinner.  No drinking permitted between meals:  to which regulation. I am gradually becoming habituated. It is difficult to acquire new habits.  Precious difficult in mid-ocean, where there isn’t a tailor. [Humorous again, eh?] I now understand what is the meaning of “a Depression is crossing the Atlantic.”  There’s an awful Depression hanging about the Baltic.

[Illustration]

I send you a sketch of Elsinore, as I thought it would be, and Elsinore as it is.  Elsinore is like the Pumping Works at Barking Creek.  And I’ve come all this way to see this!!  Elsinore!  I’d rather go Elsewhere-inore,—­say, Margate.

Think I shall put this in a bottle, cork it up, and send it overboard, and you’ll get it by Tidal Post.  Whether I do this or not depends on circumstances over which I may possibly have no control.  Anyhow, at dinner-time, I shall ask for the bottle. When you ask for it, see that you get it.

Yours truly,
JETSAM

(or Yotting Artist in Black and White). 10 A.M.  Swedish time 9.5 in English miles.  Longitude 4 ft. 8 in. in my berth.  Latitude, any amount of.

* * * * *

AN EXCELLENT RULE.—­We are informed that “extreme ugliness” and “male hysteria” are admitted as “adequate disqualifications” for the French Army.  If the same rule only applied to the English House of Commons, what a deal of noise and nonsense we should be spared!

[Illustration:  A METROPOLITAN METAMORPHOSIS.

The Awful Result of Persistent “Crawling."]

* * * * *

THE DYING SWAN.

(Latest Version, a long way after the Laureate.)

“THAMES ’SWAN UPPING.’—­The QUEEN’S swanherd and the officials of the Dyers’ and Vintners’ Companies arrived at Windsor yesterday on their annual ‘swan-upping’ visit, for the purpose of marking or ‘nicking’ the swans and cygnets belonging to HER MAJESTY, and the Companies interested in the preservation of the birds that haunt the stream between London and Henley.  It is said that the Thames swans are steadily decreasing owing to the traffic on the upper reaches of the river, and other causes detrimental to their breeding.”—­The Times.

  I.

  July was wet,—­a thing not rare—­
  With sodden ground and chilly air;
  The sky presented everywhere
  A low-pitched roof of doleful grey;
  With a rain-flusht flood the river ran;
  Adown it floated a dying Swan,
  And loudly did lament. 
  It was the middle of the day,
  The “Swanherd” and his men went on,
  “Nicking” the cygnets as they went.