Page:Letters from India Vol 1.djvu/31

 only individual amongst us whose happiness has been actually improved by the voyage. He has a little window of his own, with a netting over it, in the after—cabin; and there he sits all day, making his oddest sobs of pleasure at the foam, or Mother Carey’s chickens, or anything that he can see moving. It is supposed that he keeps a log for the beneﬁt of the other dogs.

Saturday, November 14, Lat. 19° South.

—As they say we are to arrive at Rio on Tuesday or Wednesday, I was inclined not to write till then; but it is a horrid business to survey and sketch a new quarter of the globe completely in a few days, and leaves little time for writing. Besides, I have vague notions of the dignity of ‘crowing from one’s own dunghill,’ so I write lying on a hard couch in a close cabin of a rolling ship, and at an hour when what they call ‘exercises’ are going on—five in the afternoon—when 250 men begin stamping about, just overhead, dragging ropes and chains and blocks after them; all the officers screaming, and all the petty officers whistling—so pleasant! It only lasts an hour!