Our cook has specially interested me—­a tall, slender, melancholy man, with a watery-blue eye, a patient, dejected visage, like an individual weary of the storms and commotions of life, and thoroughly impressed with the vanity of human wishes.  I sit there hour after hour watching him, and it is evident that he performs all his duties in this frame of sad composure.  Now I see him resignedly stuffing a turkey, anon compounding a sauce, or mournfully making little ripples in the crust of a tart; but all is done under an evident sense that it is of no use trying.

Many complaints have been made of our coffee since we have been on board, which, to say the truth, has been as unsettled as most of the social questions of our day, and, perhaps, for that reason quite as generally unpalatable; but since I have seen our cook, I am quite persuaded that the coffee, like other works of great artists, has borrowed the hues of its maker’s mind.  I think I hear him soliloquize over it—­“To what purpose is coffee?—­of what avail tea?—­thick or clear?—­all is passing away—­a little egg, or fish skin, more or less, what are they?” and so we get melancholy coffee and tea, owing to our philosophic cook.

After dinner I watch him as he washes dishes:  he hangs up a whole row of tin; the ship gives a lurch, and knocks them all down.  He looks as if it was just what he expected.  “Such is life!” he says, as he pursues a frisky tin pan in one direction, and arrests the gambols of the ladle in another; while the wicked sea, meanwhile, with another lurch, is upsetting all his dishwater.  I can see how these daily trials, this performing of most delicate and complicated gastronomic operations in the midst of such unsteady, unsettled circumstances, have gradually given this poor soul a despair of living, and brought him into this state of philosophic melancholy.  Just as Xantippe made a sage of Socrates, this whisky, frisky, stormy ship life has made a sage of our cook.  Meanwhile, not to do him injustice, let it be recorded, that in all dishes which require grave conviction and steady perseverance, rather than hope and inspiration, he is eminently successful.  Our table excels in viands of a reflective and solemn character; mighty rounds of beef, vast saddles of mutton, and the whole tribe of meats in general, come on in a superior style.  English plum pudding, a weighty and serious performance, is exhibited in first-rate order.  The jellies want lightness,—­but that is to be expected.

I admire the thorough order and system with which every thing is done on these ships.  One day, when the servants came round, as they do at a certain time after dinner, and screwed up the shelf of decanters and bottles out of our reach, a German gentleman remarked, “Ah, that’s always the way on English ships; every thing done at such a time, without saying ‘by your leave,’ If it had been on an American ship now, he would have said, ’Gentlemen, are you ready to have this shelf raised?’”