which I take for my writing time, just to try my powers of abstraction. I cannot tell you what a ship is, particularly when one has been several years on board, which is our case.
and I were agreeing that, without any exaggeration, we should say it was two or three years since we left Portsmouth; and what is more odd is, that it seems much longer since we left Madeira. That is so long ago that we cannot remember the names of the people we saw there, nor anything about it distinctly. As you are never likely to come and judge for yourself, allow me to rectify several errors into which we have all been led by our easy credulity. In the first place, there is nothing so little sublime as the sea; it is always tiresome, and very often dirty and soap-suddy. Then, it is not true that ‘there are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it;’ there are hardly any fish, and those few are not to be caught. We entrapped a small shark, and that is all; the flying-fish are rather like grasshoppers, but without the pleasing accompaniment of grass, and dolphins we have never yet seen. Then, a tropical sun is not that fiery furnace we have always supposed it to be. On Friday, when we were actually
