mercial spirit. I am not by nature a commercial man myself, yet under her influence I found myself selling paraffin oil in cases in the Bights: and even to missionaries and Government officials travelling on her in between ports, she suggested the advisability of having out churches, houses, &c., in sections carefully marked with her name.
As we ran down the Irish Channel and into the Bay of Biscay, the weather was what the mariners termed "a bit fresh." Our craft was evidently a wet ship, either because she was nervous and femininely flurried when she saw a large wave coming, or, as I am myself inclined to believe, because of her insatiable mania for shipping cargo. Anyhow, she habitually sat down in the rise of those waves, whereby, from whatever motive, she managed to ship a good deal of the Atlantic Ocean in various sized sections.
Her saloon, as aforesaid, was aft, and I observed it was the duty, in order to keep it dry, of any one near the main door who might notice a ton or so of the fourth element coming aboard, to seize up three cocoa-fibre mats, shut three cabin doors and yell "Bill!" After doing this they were seemingly at full liberty to retire into the saloon and dam the Atlantic Ocean, and remark, "It's a dog's life at sea." I never noticed "Bill" come in answer to this performance, so I was getting to regard "Bill" as an invocation to a weather Ju Ju; but this was hasty, for one night in the Bay I was roused by a new noise, and on going into the saloon to see what it was, found the stewardess similarly engaged; mutually we discovered, in the dim light—she wasn't the boat to go and throw away money on electric—that it was the piano adrift of its dais, and we steered for it. Very cleverly we fielded en route a palm in pot complete, but shipped some beer and Worcester sauce bottles that came at us from the
