I was sure I was seasick; and I am convinced any inexperienced bystander, had there been one there, would have been misled by my demeanor into regarding me as a seasick person—­but it was a wrong diagnosis.  The steward told me so himself when he called the next morning.  He came and found me stretched prone on the bed of affliction; and he asked me how I felt, to which I replied with a low and hollow groan—­tolerably low and exceedingly hollow.  It could not have been any hollower if I had been a megaphone.

So he looked me over and told me that I had climate fever.  We were passing through the Gulf Stream, where the water was warmer than elsewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, and I had a touch of climate fever.  It was a very common complaint in that latitude; many persons suffered from it.  The symptoms were akin to seasickness, it was true; yet the two maladies were in no way to be confused.  As soon as we passed out of the Gulf Stream he felt sure I would be perfectly well.  Meantime he would recommend that I get Lubly to take the rest of my things off and then remain perfectly quiet.  He was right about it too.

Regardless of what one may think oneself, one is bound to accept the statement of an authority on this subject; and if a steward on a big liner, who has traveled back and forth across the ocean for years, is not an authority on climate fever, who is?  I looked at it in that light.  And sure enough, when we had passed out of the Gulf Stream and the sea had smoothed itself out, I made a speedy and satisfactory recovery; but if it had been seasickness I should have confessed it in a minute.  I have no patience with those who quibble and equivocate in regard to their having been seasick.

I had one relapse—­a short one, but painful.  In an incautious moment, when I wist not wot I wotted, I accepted an invitation from the chief engineer to go below.  We went below—­miles and miles, I think—­to where, standing on metal runways that were hot to the foot, overalled Scots ministered to the heart and the lungs and the bowels of that ship.  Electricity spat cracklingly in our faces, and at our sides steel shafts as big as the pillars of a temple spun in coatings of spumy grease; and through the double skin of her we could hear, over our heads, a mighty Niagaralike churning as the slew-footed screws kicked us forward twenty-odd knots an hour.  Someone raised the cover of a vat, and peering down into the opening we saw a small, vicious engine hard at work, entirely enveloped in twisty, coily, stewy depths of black oil, like a devil-fish writhing in sea-ooze and cuttle-juice.