never forget. 'Will it ever be worse than this?' was a question I
had often heard asked, when everything was sliding and bumping
about, and when it certainly did seem difficult to comprehend the
possibility of anything afloat being more disturbed, without
toppling over and going down. 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 conceive. 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 onward like a monster goaded into
madness, to be beaten down, and battered, and crushed, and leaped
on by the angry sea - that thunder, lightning, hail, and rain, and
wind, are all in fierce contention for the mastery - that every
plank has its groan, every nail its shriek, and every drop of water
in the great ocean its howling voice - is nothing. To say that all
is grand, and all appalling and horrible in the last degree, is
nothing. Words cannot express it. Thoughts cannot convey it.
Only a dream can call it up again, in all its fury, rage, and
passion.

And yet, in the very midst of these terrors, I was placed in a
situation so exquisitely ridiculous, that even then I had as strong
a sense of its absurdity as I have now, and could no more help
laughing than I can at any other comical incident, happening under
circumstances the most favourable to its enjoyment. About midnight
we shipped a sea, which forced its way through the skylights, burst
open the doors above, and came raging and roaring down into the