UNPALATABLE DIET. 
171 
descent of the whip. And so we get on to dinner-time; 
the occasion of another gathering, which misses the tea 
and coffee of breakfast, but rejoices in pickled cabbage 
and dried peaches instead. 
“At dinner as at breakfast the raw potato comes in, 
our hygienic luxury. Like doctor-stuff generally, it is 
not as appetizing as desirable. Grating it down nicely, 
leaving out the ugly red spots liberally, and adding the 
utmost oil as a lubricant, it is as much as I can do to 
persuade the mess to shut their eyes and bolt it, like 
Mrs. Squeers’s molasses and brimstone at Dotheboys 
Hall. Two absolutely refuse to taste it. I tell them 
of the Silesians using its leaves as spinach, of the 
whalers in the South Seas getting drunk on the mo¬ 
lasses which had preserved the large potatoes of the 
Azores,—I point to this gum, so fungoid and angry the 
day before yesterday, and so flat and amiable to-day,— 
all by a potato poultice: my eloquence is wasted: they 
persevere in rejecting the admirable compound. 
“ Sleep, exercise, amusement, and work at will, carry 
on the day till our six o’clock supper, a meal something 
like breakfast and something like dinner, only a little 
more scant: and the officers come in with the reports 
of the day. Doctor Hayes shows me the log, I sign it; 
Sontag the weather, I sign the weather; Mr. Bonsall 
the tides and thermometers. Thereupon comes in mine- 
ancient, Brooks; and I enter in his journal No. 3 all the 
work done under his charge, and discuss his labors for 
the morrow. 
“ McGary conies next, with the cleaning-up arrange- 
