TWO DIANAS IN ALASKA 71 



fo'castle ! I felt absolutely certain that the knife had 

 slipped after a further parley with the bacon, and Tom 

 was decapitated. As I know nothing whatever of 

 ambulance work, and had had quite enough worry 

 for one morning, before breakfast too, I went on deck. 



Presently the Leader came to me. The cook, he 

 said, was in a species of fit, and would I help? I 

 was so relieved to hear that it was not the bacon 

 knife I went willingly, though I am completely ignor- 

 ant of any workable method for the suppression of fits. 

 I once helped to suppress a swarm of bees, and danced 

 about crashing two pan lids together; but fits are 

 another story. If it had not been for a wonderful 

 little paper, a domestic encyclopaedia, called Home 

 Snips, engineered by the clever man who runs the 

 Daily Wail, we should have been in parlous case 

 indeed. 



Luckily the cabin boy had a copy in his kit, and 

 presented it to us. Fortunately there was an article 

 on " Fits : and how to cure them," and we did all it 

 said. Home Snips is such a remarkable little paper, 

 quite indispensable to housewives it claimed to be, and 

 I should think with reason. I found a recipe for 

 making a good imitation of tomatoes, should tomatoes 

 happen to be expensive, by parboiling some strips of 

 red flannel, and another invaluable hint for converting 

 turnips into a creditable representation of mushrooms 

 by carving them into shape, and then serving up the 

 deceptions with a covering of mushroom ketchup. 



We finally breakfasted at n A.M., and by that time 

 the Lily was under weigh, heading for the Trinity Isles. 



