so many discouraging impossibilities; knotted strings cannot be untied, and modes of fastening which seemed curious and convenient, when you had nothing else to do but fasten them, now look disgustingly impracticable.  Nevertheless, your fate for the whole voyage depends upon your rousing yourself to get upon deck at first; to give up, then, is to be condemned to the Avernus, the Hades of the lower regions, for the rest of the voyage.

Ah, those lower regions!—­the saloons—­every couch and corner filled with prostrate, despairing forms, with pale cheeks, long, willowy hair and sunken eyes, groaning, sighing, and apostrophizing the Fates, and solemnly vowing between every lurch of the ship, that “you’ll never catch them going to sea again, that’s what you won’t;” and then the bulletins from all the state rooms—­“Mrs. A. is sick, and Miss B. sicker, and Miss C. almost dead, and Mrs. E., F., and G. declare that they shall give up.”  This threat of “giving up” is a standing resort of ladies in distressed circumstances; it is always very impressively pronounced, as if the result of earnest purpose; but how it is to be carried out practically, how ladies do give up, and what general impression is made on creation when they do, has never yet appeared.  Certainly the sea seems to care very little about the threat, for he goes on lurching all hands about just as freely afterwards as before.

There are always some three or four in a hundred who escape all these evils.  They are not sick, and they seem to be having a good time generally, and always meet you with “What a charming run we are having!  Isn’t it delightful?” and so on.  If you have a turn for being disinterested, you can console your miseries by a view of their joyousness.  Three or four of our ladies were of this happy order, and it was really refreshing to see them.

For my part, I was less fortunate.  I could not and would not give up and become one of the ghosts below, and so I managed, by keeping on deck and trying to act as if nothing was the matter, to lead a very uncertain and precarious existence, though with a most awful undertone of emotion, which seemed to make quite another thing of creation.

I wonder that people who wanted to break the souls of heroes and martyrs never thought of sending them to sea and keeping them a little seasick.  The dungeons of Olmutz, the leads of Venice, in short, all the naughty, wicked places that tyrants ever invented for bringing down the spirits of heroes, are nothing to the berth of a ship.  Get Lafayette, Kossuth, or the noblest of woman, born, prostrate in a swinging, dizzy berth of one of these sea coops, called state rooms, and I’ll warrant almost any compromise might be got out of them.

Where in the world the soul goes to under such influences nobody knows; one would really think the sea tipped it all out of a man, just as it does the water out of his wash basin.  The soul seems to be like one of the genii enclosed in a vase, in the Arabian Nights; now, it rises like a pillar of cloud, and floats over land and sea, buoyant, many-hued, and glorious; again, it goes down, down, subsiding into its copper vase, and the cover is clapped on, and there you are.  A sea voyage is the best device for getting the soul back into its vase that I know of.