exhilarating sounds raised in their various state-rooms by the
seventy passengers who were too ill to get up to breakfast. I say
nothing of them: for although I lay listening to this concert for
three or four days, I don't think I heard it for more than a
quarter of a minute, at the expiration of which term, I lay down
again, excessively sea-sick.

Not sea-sick, be it understood, in the ordinary acceptation of the
term: I wish I had been: but in a form which I have never seen or
heard described, though I have no doubt it is very common. I lay
there, all the day long, quite coolly and contentedly; with no
sense of weariness, with no desire to get up, or get better, or
take the air; with no curiosity, or care, or regret, of any sort or
degree, saving that I think I can remember, in this universal
indifference, having a kind of lazy joy - of fiendish delight, if
anything so lethargic can be dignified with the title - in the fact
of my wife being too ill to talk to me. If I may be allowed to
illustrate my state of mind by such an example, I should say that I
was exactly in the condition of the elder Mr. Willet, after the
incursion of the rioters into his bar at Chigwell. Nothing would
have surprised me. If, in the momentary illumination of any ray of
intelligence that may have come upon me in the way of thoughts of
Home, a goblin postman, with a scarlet coat and bell, had come into
that little kennel before me, broad awake in broad day, and,
apologising for being damp through walking in the sea, had handed
me a letter directed to myself, in familiar characters, I am
certain I should not have felt one atom of astonishment: I should
have been perfectly satisfied. If Neptune himself had walked in,
with a toasted shark on his trident, I should have looked upon the
event as one of the very commonest everyday occurrences.