SECOND DAY.

Mr. George Morris did not sleep well his first night on the _City of
Buffalo_. He dreamt that he was being chased around the deck by a couple
of young ladies, one a very pronounced blonde, and the other an equally
pronounced brunette, and he suffered a great deal because of the
uncertainty as to which of the two pursuers he desired the most to
avoid. It seemed to him that at last he was cornered, and the fiendish
young ladies began literally, as the slang phrase is, to mop the deck
with him. He felt himself being slowly pushed back and forward across
the deck, and he wondered how long he would last if this treatment were
kept up. By and by he found himself lying still in his bunk, and the
swish, swish above him of the men scrubbing the deck in the early
morning showed him his dream had merged into reality. He remembered then
that it was the custom of the smoking-room steward to bring a large
silver pot of fragrant coffee early every morning and place it on the
table of the smoking-room. Morris also recollected that on former
voyages that early morning coffee had always tasted particularly good.
It was grateful and comforting, as the advertisement has it. Shortly
after, Mr. Morris was on the wet deck, which the men were still
scrubbing with the slow, measured swish, swish of the brush he had heard
earlier in the morning. No rain was falling, but everything had a rainy
look. At first he could see only a short distance from the ship. The
clouds appeared to have come down on the water, where they hung,
lowering. There was no evidence that such a thing as a sun existed. The
waves rolled out of this watery mist with an oily look, and the air was
so damp and chilly that it made Morris shiver as he looked out on the
dreary prospect. He thrust his hands deep into his coat pockets, which
seemed to be an indolent habit of his, and walked along the slippery
deck to search for the smoking-room. He was thinking of his curious and