influence, as he sets forth, the Sunday at sea was passed in public worship by crew and passengers, to the great edification of both, and to the admiration of their accompanying vessels. Sorry am I to say, that on Sunday the very reverse was the case, in the party of which I am the historianconsider, two Frenchmen, a deist, a polemic, and some half dozen free thinkers! The Frenchmen seemed to be more than usually gay, and St. Etienne actually proposed a little dramatic scene for the evening, but was over-ruled by the captain. We walked, talked, sang, played, and romped about, however, rather more than previously.

After the ladies had retired for the night, the Doctor and M. Rotte were about renewing their controversy; and a third person, of some note as it afterwards appeared, took occasion to pass a very well worded reprobation of our mode of spending the Lord's day. How irresistible are the admonitions of sincerity! there was not one among us who entirely subscribed to this man's opinions, but not one of us who did not receive his statement of them with real respect for him and them: I would give you a specimen of his oratory, for such his hints became; but I am afraid I could not separate the extremes from the reasonable, and so might injure the whole.

Traveling by sea loses sadly in comparison with land, in point of adventures; in the latter, you have a Continual change of objects, you sleep every night in a different bed, you wake to new scenes and faces, and your time is an agreeable variety of place, circumstances, and subjects. In a voyage you never move out of the circumscribed limits of a plank; you behold the same objects from your outset to your arrival; de facto, your travels are no further than from your abode to the ship's side, and accordingly you are debarred from all opportunity of observation, from variety of incidents (the very essence of amusement), except in so far as the company you meet creates it. Only think what glorious scenes one must encounter in a journey to London, like Roderick Random, and Strap; but yet I am not certain, that if Smollett had lived in the 19th, instead of the 18th century, he would not have sent his hero to London in a

smack, in place of a waggon: and I think I may safely assure the first novelist who means to transplant a northern hero to the capital, that a smack is by far the most likely conveyance of the two, for incidents of all sorts; and when it is considered how well the road is now known, and how little variety can be expected from what every body is acquainted with, there can be little doubt that Messrs. the Novelists will thank me for the hint.

I wonder how Dr. Johnson would have behaved in a company like ours, when they reminded him of the place he preferred to "a ship:" the idea occurred to me almost every time we were among our elegancies, for let me tell you, these are neither trifling nor scarce in any passage vessel nowa-days; and in the present instance, they were peculiarly plentiful and choice. Of room, we have abund ance; of food, we have an incredible variety, and all kinds of amusements; we can be retired, or we can join the company as we incline, each person having a little chamber to himself, clean to a degree, and fitted up with the utmost neatness, and with every comfort that any house on shore can bestow. In short, hating sea sick ness, and occasional foul weather, neither of which was among us to any extent, a Leith smack is a moving hotel, where the guests live together as at a watering place.

But a voyage would not be complete without a storm, or an alarm of some serious kind; and thankful am I, a true historian, that there is no temptation to me to invent one, there having happened to us, on Tuesday evening, just as decent a touch of the terrible as any prose writer need wish. The day had been unsettled and squally, and to use the sailor's phrase, "the grey meere's tail was i' the clouds." As it was not boisterous, however, it did not impede our usual gambols, except by occasional squeamishness among the females. We were approaching Yarmouth Roads; I forget, or rather I never knew how the wind stood; but we were moving very rapidly through the water, the breeze evidently increasing, and the air darkening to an alarming degree. Whether to keep the passengers quite at ease by affecting carelessness, or to drive away

of time, they proceeded to right the vessel, and make signals to the shore. We were about two miles distant from the town of Yarmouth, whence accordingly boats were sent out to our assistance, but before their arrival, the danger had gone by; the first distinguishable voice was that of the captain calling" all hands on the lee-bow," possibly less intelligible to most of those to whom it was directed, than if it had been Greek; and consequently attended to by none correctly. The wind had abated a little, and the rain now came down; the surf about us was very strong, and upon the bow of the vessel we could see the sand quite uncovered, the tide being at ebb. The captain assured us in the most solemn manner that there was not a spark of danger, but that if we had any fears, boats were at hand to convey every passenger on board to Yarmouth, at the ship's expense. We had either that confidence in the skill of S. or that terror of a pinnace in a high sea, that not a person thought of moving, to the great discontent of the Yarmouth boatmen, who were now getting the vessel over the bank, and who did what they could to ter rify us out of a couple of guineas a piece, for boat hire: from all that I could observe of these people, they were quite distressed at our want of distress, and seemed actually to abuse us for not having been half sunk be fore they arrived. Though the danger was over, the confusion and terror were not, and the latter were heightened by the flapping of the main sail in the wind, the surf, the boats, and the cries of the sailors; and, spite of all assurances of safety, none of the passengers felt safe.

uneasiness from his own breast, I know not, but about five o'clock the captain sat down to the backgammon board, on deck, with Mr. L.; the mate was at the helm; the passengers one or other were walking about, sitting, reading, and so forth; while I was playing with the children, and trying to make them keep their feet: the breeze had lasted long enough to accustom us to it, and to abate, if not dispel, that secret involuntary terror which a heavy sea, and the lean of the vessel leeward always excite in fresh-water folks, so that at the moment I am describing, I do not think that danger was dreamt of by any individual on board. At that awful moment, however, we struck on a bank, with a shock that drove every moveable article, alive and dead, several feet from its position; while a wave, dashing against the weather bow, whelmed the cabin skylight overboard, loosened the door way, and swept a heap of stools, tables, and boxes into the deep. "Inse quitur clamorque virûm stridorque rudentum," cries, screams, crashes, and every sort of confusion ensued; we were inundated to the very sternpost; several of those on the weather side were absolutely floated to leeward, while the water rushed in rivers down the cabin window, bearing all before it. The vessel eased so much to that side, that every soul on board was in momentary expectation of being swallowed up in the yawning gulf below. It was horrible, horrible; I cannot tell you my feelings death was in every face: some were lying apparently dead in the pool upon deck; some were scrambling to gain the weather side; here was a father, there a child, here a wife, there a husband; the two families were strewed about in all directions; the looks, the shrieks, the despair in every countenance, were far, very far beyond the powers of description: I look upon it, Frank, that every individual of us felt, as far as mental sensation goes, the pangs of death in their direst degree. It is in vain for me to write more about this dreadful shock; I cannot make it equal to the truth, and any attempt at effect would be as abortive as unworthy. When the senses of the captain and sailors returned, which, to do them justice, was in not much above half a minute

It was at this period of the drama that a scene took place which at once divested it of all pretensions to the character of tragedy, and by its broad extravagance made us as vich a melodrame, as the utmost efforts of Messrs. Hook, Dimond, and Co. could have manufactured. A voice was heard from the fore cabin uttering in the deepest notes of dolour, "Whare is he? Whare is he? bring me till him, my ain bairn, my laddie, my darling laddie; he wad na miz wi'the scorners, but the Lord's will be done: but dinna part us, dinna part us.” The figure which now

was seen issuing from the hatchway, was that of an old woman in a large bodied gown flung behind, check apron, coloured neckkerchief, all of the ancient cast, with a cap which must have been out of date in 1785; grey hair rolled in thick folds on a shrivel'd forehead; small blue eyes, and a peculiarly animated countenance for her age-an old woman, Frank, whom you have seen, and who, perhaps, was the first being in the world whom I saw; Nelly Handyside, my Nurse. How she came where she was, and why, you must ask her so it was and is, that for my sins she is doomed to torment my life out with her attachment, and I am doomed not to have courage to throw her into the sea, though God knows, I am guilty of more heinous crimes than saying that I wished her at the bottom of it. Judge if I had reason; she rushed like a sybil under the influence of an incantation, right across the deck, and singling me from the company, who were just beginning to calm a little, flung her withered old arms about my neck, sobbing and blubbering out, "Na, na, my bairn, my ain bairn, it winna be; twa and twenty year the gither mauna be parted now, we'll gang down thegither as we cam up-my lamb. Neither wonder than we gang to the bottom; it couldna be ither wi'sic graceless reprobates:" and so forth. It was in vain that I tried to quiet, threaten, or command her; she seemed resolved that the ship should sink, and no power on earth could persuade her to the contrary: I was hugged, tugged, and slobbered about, till my temper was almost gone; and her eternal ejaculations for mercy on our souls, and her downright abuse of every body within her sight, were to the last degree provoking. Take a sample, "Aye, ye sit fu crouse now wi your sangs on the Lord's day, ye wicked heathen, but ye'll may be sing another sang or mornin; Lord deal mercifully wi'thy ain folk! Ye wad daur the Lord on his ain day wi your profane courses, an ye maun drag the innocent amang ye to perdition, but the Lord's no unmindful of his ain in tribulation. Na, na, my bairn, we'll no be set amang the goats; but Lot couldna save Sodom, and we maun gang down like the lave: but woe to the scoffer in the

evil day, for great shall be the wrath to come." I think it was Lord Shaftsbury who first calls ridicule the test of truth; he would have been much more correct had he said of temper: what have my forebears, or what have I done, that I should be pre-ordained to submit to the laugh of a crowd of people through the mental exuberations of a disordered fanatic? and why am I held, by a stupid affection for a person who is my torment, from ridding myself of her for ever? but there it lies; she will not leave me, and I cannot set her off! S'death, Frank, were you ever laughed at? Were you ever gibed, jeered, and joked by a parcel of witlings? Were you ever beset with an old woman as I was? And what do you think, they have the face to say that I returned the old woman's endearments; that I was melted by her attachment; and the more staid and sensible of them commend my nature, forsooth! But you have not heard the whole; while Nelly was pulling me about, we were every instant in danger of being upset together by the motion of the ship, so that, sometimes we were close together, and sometimes wide apart; her arms, however, still keeping their purchase, as the captain called it, and her tongue its creaking, when I was set upon by another family appendage, who, though not quite so obstreporous or unruly as Nelly, vies with her, I believe, in affection for her master (for which by the bye she hates him cordially), Hector, the old house dog! Was this to be borne, Frank? Nelly's arms on one side, and Hector's paws on the other. We looked, as Holmes afterwards told me, exactly like the King's arms over Mr. Hunter's shop door on the south bridge; our voices made such a trio as, I believe, never was heard by mortal ear: "for God sake let me go, Nelly; down Hector; Nelly be quiet; kennel up, you rascal: we are quite safe Nelly, let me go-take off the dog, will you,"-answered by barks on both sides, "Hout na! I'se no let ye go, ye cam into the warld whare ye're now, and ye maun e'en gang out o't sae; doun, ye great tyke. Let ye go indeed; I wonder wha wad get ye, gin I let ye go, trow! Ay, ye may look (to the people) an ye may laugh; as the fool thinks the bell chinks-doun Hec!"-Bark

went Hector; groan went Nelly; laugh go the auditors; down go we in a heap! There were now no bounds to the laughter. It is incredible how soon the sorrow of the last moment was changed into mirth. I may say, that but for this broad scene of the ludicrous, we should have been buried in the vapours for the rest of the voyage; but, however much one likes to see mirthand hilarity restored, the most facetious of us demur to the restoration at our expence. After our tumble, Nelly was lifted almost by force and put into bed. The cause of her furor, for I can call it nothing else, was the ungodly conduct of the men in the fore-cabin, where she had occasion to be a good deal with the other servants on board, taken along with that of the passengers on Sunday, and partly our having sung and played music. I had sent her a glass of Younger's ale after dinner, and I was told she was fast asleep when the vessel struck; most probably she had waked from some hideous dream, and acted upon it as a reality. Hector seemed to think the whole was a mighty good frolic, and I had just sense enough left to appear to think so too;-yet I was deucedly roasted; and how I am to come on with Nelly as a housekeeper, in London, I tremble to think!

We got towed over the bank about midnight, and the pumps were at work night and day till our arrival in the Thames. Our terrors were now converted intosubjects for jokes; and, bating the long accounts of sea dangers, which all present, more or less, had come through, we talked of nothing else than the oddness of each other's behaviour in the time of the alarm. It had happened to me to light upon the Doctor almost immediately after the danger was over: he also had apparently been asleep; he lay on the ground bed in the passage between the two cabins, and when I came upon him, he was poking his bald long head out of the aperture, which he had drawn so sparingly, that his head only could get out: in his left hand he kept the place of the book he was reading, and in his right he held an enormous raw turnip which he had just begun to munch. He asked me what was the matter, and on my expressing surprise at his being ignorant of it, he replied

by sending his tusks into the turnip, with a cranch that set mine on edge; he kept mumbling and muttering over his food, and seemed as voracious as if he had not tasted meat for twelve hours: his strangely shaped head, the white lank bony fingers in which he held the immense lump of vegetable,-and, above all, the merciless gnash of his teeth into it, brought to my mind all the horrors of Ugolino, and really there was no small resemblance.

Every body had, of course, something more dreadful and more marvelous to tell than his neighbour; and thus the time passed till Wednesday at noon, when we cast anchor, for the tide, at a place called Purfleet, on the Thames; they told us some indistinct story of the name having been given by Queen Elizabeth ("my poor fleet,") in the time of the Armada: it was the first bit of English ground on which I ever set foot, and that may damn it to everlasting fame, if nothing else will. Holmes, P., and some two or three more of us hired a wherry for an hour or so, and landed there. It is an old kind of place; you see a church in the middle of an apparently good glebe, and cottages around it; the steeple does not rise above the real surface of the ground, being built in a chalk pit: it has a very picturesque effect upon a stranger; and the structure of the cottages, the neat little plots of garden, the river, and all that, set those sensations afloat in my breast upon which you and I had so much sage disquisition before my departure :-of these in due time. We returned to the ship, after having got imposed upon in a purchase of a pound of eels from some boatmen.

The river, from a little way below Woolwich, presents a perfect forest of masts; its windings, warehouses, works, seats, hospitals, storehouses, depth, breadth, length, and strength are-all to be found in the picture of London, where you may have a full, true, and particular account of the whole of them, for the small charge of

shillings. Thank God, I am restricted by our agreement to an account of the personel and morale of London, not of the materiel. So pray purchase a plan of it, and the picture aforesaid, if you mean to follow my narrative, for I really will not set