As we sailed along on our voyage to India, gradually slipping down from the high to the low latitudes, the sun crept up higher and higher every day towards the zenith, while the thermometer, of course, rose likewise.  What was most agreeable in this change from cold to warmth was the little difference between the temperature of the day and that of the night.  As we approached the equator, the thermometer fell only from 82 deg. in the day-time to 79 deg. or 80 deg. at night, which, on deck, was delightful.  We did not, of course, come to this high temperature all at once; for on the 6th of May, the day after we passed directly under the sun, the average of the twenty-four hours was 73 deg., and at night 69 deg. and 70 deg..

It is not to be imagined that everyone was pleased with these changes; for on board ship, as on shore, there exist discontented spirits, whose acquired habit it is to find fault with the existing state of things, be these what they may.  To such cantankerous folks a growl of misery would really seem to be the great paradoxical happiness of their lives, and, in the absence of real hardship, it is part of your thorough-bred growler to prophesy.  I have seen a middy of this stamp glad to find, on coming below, that some insignificant portion of his dinner really had been devoured by his hungry messmates, while he himself was keeping his watch on deck.

“I am used worse than a dog!” he would cry, secretly delighted to have gained the luxury of a grievance, “I can’t even get a basin of pease-soup put by for me; it’s an infernal shame, I’ll cut the service!”

The diversity of climate on an Indian voyage furnishes capital nuts for these perturbed spirits.  It is first too cold, then too hot; then there is not wind enough; then it blows too fresh in the squalls:  by-and-bye the nights are discovered to be abominably close and sultry, and in the day the fierce flaming downright heat of the sun is still worse; then the calms are never to be over; or the lying trades, as they call them, have got capsized, and blow from the west instead of the east!  After the line has been crossed, and the south-east wind is met with, the weather soon becomes what these ingenious fellows call too temperate, then it grows too cold again; and next off the Cape the latitude is too stormy.  In this alone they have some reason; and I have often regretted that, by a royal ordinance of the King of Portugal, the name of this mighty promontory was changed from Cabo de Tormentos, the headland of storms, to its present spoony title.  In short, this grand voyage is merely a peristrephic panorama of miseries, which if they survive, say they, it will be happy for them.—­Happy!  Not a whit.  It is out of their nature to be happy.  To find fault, to fling away the good the gods provide them, and to aggravate the pain of every real wound by the impatience of idle complaints, is their diseased joy.  “Evil, be thou my good!” they might well exclaim; for, instead of heightening the pleasures of life by full participation, or subduing its inevitable evils, or, at all events, softening their asperity by enduring with fortitude and cheerfulness what cannot be helped, these self-tormentors reject what is substantially pleasing, and cling with habitual but morbid relish to whatever is disagreeable.