TRAVELS IN THE CALIFORNI AS. 
23 
sleep in infancy by the billows, educated in the school of 
the tempest, learn to hold your heads still enough to comb 
your glistening tresses! and much more get food within 
your pearly grinders! 
Pictures of woe were we, starving, yet loathing food; 
thirsting, yet unable to drink; wishing for a mote of the 
stable world to look upon, yet having nothing but the un¬ 
stable water and air; imprisoned on the rolling deck, with 
no foothold, or any odor of flower or earth around. I am 
reminded here how interesting to the antiquarian would be 
the inquiry, whether or not Cupid was ever at sea in a 
storm. If he were, he would have crowned Hogarth’s im¬ 
mortality with its richest wreath, if transferred to canvass, 
in the act of running from the dinner-table, throwing his 
quiver behind him, and tipping his roguish face, bloated 
with the effort of a retching stomach, over the taffrail. 
Poor fellow, it makes one quiver to think if there ever were 
a Cupid, and he ever took passage from the Columbia river 
to the Hawaiian islands, and ever did attempt to eat, and 
while doing so were obliged to conform to the etiquette of 
sea sickness, how sadly he must have suffered, and how 
unlovely the arrow-god must have become ! 
This sea-sickness, however, is a farce of some conse¬ 
quence. Like the toothache, fever and ague, and other kin¬ 
dred follies of the body it has its origin in-the faculty will 
please answer what. But seriously. It is an effort of our na¬ 
ture to assimilate its physical condition to the desires of the 
mind. Man’s natural home as an animal is on land. As an in¬ 
tellectual being he seeks to pass this bound, and resorting to 
his capacity to press the powers of external nature into the 
service of his desires, he spikes planks to timbers, commits 
himself to the waves, rocks on their crests, habituates head 
and foot to new duties, and, girded with the armor of his im¬ 
mortal part, that wealth of Heaven, goes forth, the image and 
representative of his Maker, to see, to know, and to enjoy all 
things. But a truce to philosophy. We are on the sea. The 
