I rebury my hands in my locks, which, instead of a highly-cultivated garden, I am rapidly making into a wilderness.
"I suppose," say I, in a tone which fitly matches the length of my face, "that Bobby will have got a ship before I come back; I hope they will not send him to any very unhealthy station--Hong-Kong, or the Gold Coast." "I hope not." "What port shall we sail from ?" "Southampton." "And how long--about how long will the voyage be ?" "About seventeen days to Antigua." "And how long"-- (still in the same wretched and resignedly melancholy voice)--"shall we have to stay there ?" "It depends upon the state in which I find things ?" A good long pause.

My elbows are growing quite painful, from the length of time during which they have been digging into the hard _marqueterie_ table, and my hair is as wild as a red Indian's.

_Ten_ days! ten little galloping days, and then _seventeen_ long, slow, monstrous ones! _Seventeen_ days at sea! seventeen days and seventeen nights, too--do not let us forget that--of that deadly nausea, of that unspeakable sinking of all one's inside to the very depths of creation--of the smell of boiling oil, and the hot, sick, throbbing of engines! "I hope," say I, in a voice so small that I hardly recognize it for my own, "that I shall not be _quite_ as ill all the way as I was crossing from Calais to Dover; and the steward," continue I, in miserable meditation, "kept telling me all the while what a fine passage we were having, too!" "So we were!" Another pause.

I am still thinking of the horrid theme; living over again my nearly-forgotten agonies.
"Do you remember," say I, presently, "hearing about that Lady Somebody--I forget her name--but she was the wife of one Governor-General of India, and she always suffered so much from sea-sickness that she thought she should suffer less in a sailing-vessel, and so returned from India in one, and just as she came in sight of the shores of England _she died_!" As I reach this awful climax, I open my eyes very wide, and sink my voice to a tragic depth.
"The moral is--" says Sir Roger, stopping beside me, laying his hand on my chair back, and regarding me with a mixture of pain and diversion in his eyes, "stick to steam!".