So much for the glad weather; but, when the sky droops low, and leaping waves of mournful hue seem to rear themselves and mingle with the clouds, then the gladness is not so apparent.  Still the exulting rush of the ship through the gray seas and her contemptuous shudder as she shakes off the masses of water that thunder down on her are fine to witness.  Even a storm, when cataracts of hissing water plunge over the vessel and force every one to “hang on anywhere,” is by no means without its delights; but I must candidly say that a ship is hardly the place for a woman when the wild winds try their strength against the works of man.  On the whole, if we reckon up the pains and pleasures of life on board ship, the balance is all in favour of pleasure.  The sailors have a toilsome life, and must endure much; but they have health.  It is the sense of physical well-being that makes the mind so easy when one is on the sea; and refined men who have lived in the forecastle readily declare that they were happy but for the invariable dirt.  Instead of trooping to stuffy lodgings, those of my readers who have the nerve should, if not this year, then next summer, go right away and take a cheap and charming holiday on the open sea.

October, 1887.

WAR.

The brisk Pressmen are usually exceedingly busy in calculating the chances of a huge fight—­indeed they spend a good part of each year in that pleasing employment.  Smug diplomatists talk glibly about “war clearing the air;” and the crowd—­the rank and file—­chatter as though war were a pageant quite divorced from wounds and death, or a mere harmless hurly-burly where certain battalions receive thrashings of a trifling nature.  It is saddening to notice the levity with which the most awful of topics is treated, and especially is it sad to see how completely the women and children are thrust out of mind by belligerent persons.  We who have gazed on the monster of War, we who have looked in the whites—­or rather the reds—­of his loathsome eyes, cannot let this burst of frivolity work mischief without one temperate word of warning and protest.

Pleasant it is to watch the soldiers as they march along the streets, or form in their superb lines on parade.  No man or woman of any sensibility can help feeling proudly stirred when a Cavalry regiment goes by.  The clean, alert, upright men, with their sure seat; the massive war-horses champing their bits and shaking their accoutrements:  the rhythmic thud of hoofs, the keen glitter of steel, and the general air of power, all combine to form a spectacle that sets the pulses beating faster.  Then, again, observe the strange elastic rhythm of the march as a battalion of tall Highlanders moves past.  The fifes and drums cease, there is a silence broken only by that sinuous beautiful onward movement of lines of splendid men, until the thrilling scream of the pipes shatters the air, and the mad tumult of warlike sound makes even a Southron’s nerves quiver.