Content to have escaped, she turns her gaze within—not of course to her own interior (she is no morbid analyst) but to the interior of the boat, and surveys with merciless eyes her fellow-passengers. The letter that describes them exhibits her talent, her vitality, and her trust in Providence, and incidentally explains why she never became popular, and why "two parties," as she terms them, were at once formed on board, the one party consisting of her husband and herself, the other of everyone else. The feud, trivial at the time, was not to be without serious consequences. "You will now expect me, my dear friends," she begins, "to say something of those with whom we are cooped up, but my account will not be very satisfactory, though sufficiently interesting to us—to being there."
The grammar is hazy. But the style makes all clear.
The woman Mrs. Tulloch, of whom I entertained some suspicion from the first, is, now I am credibly informed, one of the very lowest creatures taken off the streets in London. She is so perfectly depraved in disposition that her supreme delight consists in making everybody about her miserable. It would be doing her too much honour to stain my paper with a detail of the various artifices she daily practises to that end. Her pretended husband, having been in India before and giving himself many airs, is looked upon as a person of mighty consequence whom no one chooses to offend. Therefore madam has full scope to exercise her mischievous talents, wherein he never controls her, not but that he perfectly understands to make himself feared. Coercive measures are some times resorted to. It is a common expression of the lady, "Lord bless you, if I did such or such a thing, Tulloch would make no more ado, but knock me down like an ox." I frequently amuse myself with examining their countenances, where ill-nature has fixed her empire so firmly that I scarcely believe either of them smiled except maliciously.
As for the captain he is a mere Jack in office. Being un-
