14 WITH MR. CHAMBERLAIN IN THE 



made sleep a matter of impossibility. I often used 

 to think of Mrs. Willard's lines : 



" Rocked in the cradle of the deep, 

 I lay me down in peace to sleep," 



and thought she would have piped a very different 

 tune had she been on board the Etruria, We were 

 battened down half the time, and unable to go on 

 deck. A lifeboat was swept away and a huge venti- 

 lator bent double. Some of the seamen, too, were 

 badly hurt and swept off their legs. Cook admitted 

 that it was the worst passage he ever remembered, 

 and the boatswain said the same thing, and they had 

 both done the trip times without number. Was 

 there ever penned such a magnificent and realistic 

 description of the horrors of an Atlantic passage in 

 winter as Charles Dickens compiled in his American 

 Notes? — ** But what the agitation of a steam vessel 

 is on a bad winter's night in the wild Atlantic, it is 

 impossible for the most vivid imagination to con- 

 ceive. To say that she is flung down on her side in 

 the waves with her masts dipping into them, and 

 that, springing up again, she rolls over on the other 

 side, until a heavy sea strikes her with the noise of a 

 hundred great guns, and hurls her back — that she 

 stops and staggers, and shivers as though stunned, 

 and then, with a violent throbbing at her heart, darts 



