Page:Letters from India Vol 1.djvu/35

 chronometer. He is particularly fond of ‘taking lunars,’ which process is conducted by observations on the moon and a certain star called Aldebaran; and the captain does not like to have Aldebaran sneered at. begins, ‘Well, Grey, after you had shot at that wretched moon with your bit of smoked glass, I heard you send for the master; and he was coming up the hatchway, forty miles an hour, with his sextant under one arm and his lunars under the other, and dragging Aldebaran in a string after him, when he slipped, and his head came smack through my venetians. I hope Aldebaran was not hurt.’

As these sort of things give you a better notion than a regular description, I write them. I meant to make a single letter, but I cannot cram it all in; and, after all, it will not cost you more than a series of 3d. post-letters, which we might be writing; but it is no use thinking of those things. I should not like to die now, though I do not love my life as I have done—but I should die now in such a woeful frame of mind; and, besides, I cannot, as the Irish say, ‘make my soul’ on board ship—it is all such confusion.