I have used this prescription in my own case with success, and have known it to benefit others.]

The voyage from New York to San Francisco has been so often ‘done’ and is so well watered, that I shall not describe it in detail.  Most of the passengers on the steamer were old Californians and assisted in endeavoring to make the time pass pleasantly.  There was plenty of whist-playing, story telling, reading, singing, flirtation, and a very large amount of sleeping.  So far as I knew, nobody quarreled or manifested any disposition to be riotous.  There was one passenger, a heavy, burly Englishman, whose sole occupation was in drinking “arf and arf.”  He took it on rising, then another drink before breakfast, then another between Iris steak and his buttered roll, and so on every half hour until midnight, when he swallowed a double dose and went to bed.  He had a large quantity in care of the baggage master, and every day or two he would get up a few dozen pint bottles of pale ale and an equal quantity of porter.  He emptied a bottle of each into a pitcher and swallowed the whole as easily as an ordinary man would take down a dose of peppermint.  The empty bottles were thrown overboard, and the captain said that if this man were a frequent passenger there would be danger of a reef of bottles in the ocean all the way from New York to Aspinwall.  I never saw his equal for swallowing malt liquors.  To quote from Shakspeare, with a slight alteration: 

    “He was a man, take him for half and half,
    I ne’er shall look upon his like again.”

[Illustration:  Aspinwall to Panama.]

We had six hours at Aspinwall, a city that could be done in fifteen minutes, but were allowed no time on shore at Panama.  It was late at night when we left the latter port.  The waters were beautifully phosphorescent, and when disturbed by our motion they flashed and glittered like a river of stars.  Looking over the stern one could half imagine our track a path of fire, and the bay, ruffled by a gentle breeze, a waving sheet of light.  The Pacific did not belie its name.  More than half the way to San Francisco we steamed as calmly and with as little motion as upon a narrow lake.  Sometimes there was no sensation to indicate we were moving at all.

[Illustration:  Slightly monotonous.]

Even varied by glimpses of the Mexican coast, the occasional appearance of a whale with its column of water thrown high into the air, and the sportive action of schools of porpoises which is constantly met with, the passage was slightly monotonous.  On the twenty-third day from New York we ended the voyage at San Francisco.