so many happy hours and made some pleasant acquaintances.  A ship is a very forcing-house of friendship, and no one who has not taken a voyage can realize how rapidly an acquaintance grows and ripens into a friend under the lonely influences of sea and sky.  We have all been so happy together, everything has been so comfortable, everybody so kind, that one would indeed be cold-hearted if, when the last moment of our halcyon voyage arrived, it could bring with it anything short of a regret.

With the same chivalrous goodness and courtesy which has taken thought for the comfort of our every movement since we left Dartmouth, our captain insists on seeing us safely on board the Florence (what a toy-boat she looks after our stately ship!) and satisfying himself that we can be comfortably settled once more in our doll’s house of a new cabin.  Then there comes a reluctant “Good-bye” to him and all our kind care-takers of the Edinburgh Castle; and the last glimpse we catch of her—­for the Florence darts out of the bay like a swallow in a hurry—­is her dipping her ensign in courteous farewell to us.

In less than twenty-four hours we had reached another little port, some hundred and fifty miles or so up the coast, called East London.  Here the harbor is again only an open roadstead, and hardly any vessel drawing more than three or four feet of water can get in at all near the shore, for between us and it is a bar of shifting sand, washed down, day by day, by the strong current of the river Buffalo.  All the cargo has to be transferred to lighters, and a little tug steamer bustles backward and forward with messages of entreaty to those said lighters to come out and take away their loads.  We had dropped our anchor by daylight, yet at ten o’clock scarcely a boat had made its appearance alongside, and every one was fuming and fretting at the delay and consequent waste of fine weather and daylight.  That is to say, it was a fine bright day overhead, with sunshine and sparkle all round, but the heavy roll of the sea never ceased for a moment.  From one side to the other, until her ports touched the water, backward and forward, with slow, monotonous heaving, our little vessel swayed with the swaying rollers until everybody on board felt sick and sorry.  “This is comparatively a calm day,” I was told:  “you can’t possible imagine from this what rolling really is.”  But I can imagine quite easily, and do not at all desire a closer acquaintance with this restless Indian Ocean.  Breakfast is a moment of penance:  little G——­ is absolutely fainting from agonies of sea-sickness, though he has borne all our South-Atlantic tossings with perfect equanimity; and it is with real joy that I hear the lifeboat is alongside, and that the kind-hearted captain of the Florence (how kind sailors are!) offers to take babies, nurse and me on shore, so as to escape a long day of this agonizing rolling.  In happy unconsciousness of what landing at East London,