below, as far as the guns allow of their doing so.  It has always struck me as very pleasing, to see the main-deck covered, from the after hatchway to the cook’s coppers, with the people’s messes, enjoying their noon-day repast; while the celestial grog, with which their hard, dry, salt junk is washed down, out-matches twenty-fold in Jack’s estimation all the thin potations of those who, in no very courteous language, are called their betters.

Until we had crossed the North-east Trade, and reached the Calms, the ship’s way through the water was too great to allow of bathing alongside; but we easily contrived a shower-bath, which answered very well.  This consisted of a packing-box, the bottom of which was perforated with holes, triced up between two of the skids, near the gangway, and under the quarter of one of the boats on the booms.  A couple of the top-men with draw-buckets supplied the water from above, while the bather stood on the main-deck, enjoying the shower.  The time selected for this delightful bath was usually about four o’clock in the morning, after the middle watch was out, and before the exhausted officer tumbled into bed.  A four hours’ walk, indeed, in a sultry night, be it managed ever so gently, has a tendency to produce a degree of heat approaching to feverishness; and I have no words to describe the luxury of standing under a cool shower when the long task is ended.  We were generally just enough fatigued to be sure of a sound, light, happy sleep, and just enough heated to revel in the coolest water that was to be had.  In fact, we found that of the sea much too warm, being only two or three degrees below the temperature of the air.  To remedy this, our plan was, to expose a dozen buckets-full on the gangway at eight or nine o’clock in the evening; and these, being allowed to stand till morning, became so much cooler by the evaporation in the night, that the shock was unspeakably grateful.

Perhaps there is not any more characteristic evidence of our being within the tropical regions than the company of those picturesque little animals, the flying-fish.  It is true, that a stray one or two may sometimes be met with far north, making a few short skips out of the water, and I even remember seeing several close to the edge of the banks of Newfoundland, in latitude 45 deg.; but it is not until the voyager has fairly reached the heart of the torrid zone that he sees the flying-fish in perfection.  I have hardly ever observed a person so dull or unimaginative that his eye did not glisten as he watched a shoal of flying-fish rise from the sea, and skim along for several hundred yards.  There is something in it so totally dissimilar to everything else in other parts of the world, that our wonder goes on increasing every time we see even a single one take its flight.  The incredulity of the old Scotch woman on this head is sufficiently excusable.  “You may hae seen rivers o’ milk, and mountains o’ sugar,” said she to her son, returned from a voyage; “but you’ll ne’er gar me believe you have seen a fish that could flee!”