“Monday—­Got up, washed, went to bed. 
     “Tuesday—­Got up, washed, went to bed. 
     “Wednesday—­Got up, washed, went to bed. 
     “Thursday—­Got up, washed, went to bed. 
     “Friday—­Got up, washed, went to bed. 
     “Next Friday—­Got up, washed, went to bed. 
     “Friday fortnight—­Got up, washed, went to bed. 
     “Following month—­Got up, washed, went to bed.”

I stopped, then, discouraged.  Startling events appeared to be too rare, in my career, to render a diary necessary.  I still reflect with pride, however, that even at that early age I washed when I got up.  That journal finished me.  I never have had the nerve to keep one since.  My loss of confidence in myself in that line was permanent.

The ship had to stay a week or more at Gibraltar to take in coal for the home voyage.

It would be very tiresome staying here, and so four of us ran the quarantine blockade and spent seven delightful days in Seville, Cordova, Cadiz, and wandering through the pleasant rural scenery of Andalusia, the garden of Old Spain.  The experiences of that cheery week were too varied and numerous for a short chapter and I have not room for a long one.  Therefore I shall leave them all out.

CHAPTER LX.

Ten or eleven o’clock found us coming down to breakfast one morning in Cadiz.  They told us the ship had been lying at anchor in the harbor two or three hours.  It was time for us to bestir ourselves.  The ship could wait only a little while because of the quarantine.  We were soon on board, and within the hour the white city and the pleasant shores of Spain sank down behind the waves and passed out of sight.  We had seen no land fade from view so regretfully.

It had long ago been decided in a noisy public meeting in the main cabin that we could not go to Lisbon, because we must surely be quarantined there.  We did every thing by mass-meeting, in the good old national way, from swapping off one empire for another on the programme of the voyage down to complaining of the cookery and the scarcity of napkins.  I am reminded, now, of one of these complaints of the cookery made by a passenger.  The coffee had been steadily growing more and more execrable for the space of three weeks, till at last it had ceased to be coffee altogether and had assumed the nature of mere discolored water—­so this person said.  He said it was so weak that it was transparent an inch in depth around the edge of the cup.  As he approached the table one morning he saw the transparent edge—­by means of his extraordinary vision long before he got to his seat.  He went back and complained in a high-handed way to Capt.  Duncan.  He said the coffee was disgraceful.  The Captain showed his.  It seemed tolerably good.  The incipient mutineer was more outraged than ever, then, at what he denounced as the partiality shown the captain’s table over the other tables in the ship.  He flourished back and got his cup and set it down triumphantly, and said: