We rose at our usual early hour this morning, and were downstairs long before our friends anticipated our arrival, for they naturally thought that after our long walk we should have been glad of an extra hour or two’s rest; but habit, as in the time of Diogenes, had become second nature, and to remain in bed was to us equivalent to undergoing a term of imprisonment.  As boot-cleaning in those days was a much longer operation than the more modern boot-polish has made it, we compromised matters by going out in dirty boots on condition that they were cleaned while we were having breakfast.  It was a fine morning, and we were quite enchanted with Torquay, its rocks and its fine sea views on one side, and its wooded hills on the other, with mansions peeping out at intervals above the trees.  We could not recall to mind any more beautiful place that we had visited.

[Illustration:  TORQUAY FROM WALDON HILL IN 1871.]

After breakfast we attended morning service at the church recommended by our host, but after travelling so much in the open air the change to the closer atmosphere of a church or chapel affected us considerably.  Although we did not actually fall asleep, we usually became very drowsy and lapsed into a dreamy, comatose condition, with shadowy forms floating before us of persons and places we had seen in our travels.  The constant changes in position during the first part of the Church Service invariably kept us fairly well alive, but the sermon was always our chief difficulty, as during its delivery no change of posture was required.  When the service began, however, we were agreeably surprised to find that the minister who officiated was none other than the clergyman who had so kindly interested himself in finding us lodgings yesterday.  This awakened our interest in the service, which we followed as closely as we could; but when the vicar announced his text, beginning with the well-known words, “They that go down to the sea in ships,” we were all attention, for immediately our adventures in the North Sea came into our minds, and the ocean, that great work of the Almighty, is so graphically described in that 107th Psalm, and the dangers of the sailors with their fears and hopes so clearly depicted, that we record the whole text, as it appeared in the versified rendering of the Psalms, in the hope that some one may “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest”: 

They that go down to the sea in ships:  and occupy their business in great waters; these men see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the deep.  For at His word the stormy wind ariseth, which lifteth up the waves thereof.  They are carried up to the heaven, and down again to the deep:  and their soul melteth away because of the trouble.  They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit’s end.  So when they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, He delivereth them out of their distress.  For He maketh the storm to cease, so that the waves