The Arundel Castle is the finest boat I have seen in these seas.  She is thoroughly modern, and that statement covers a great deal of ground.  She has the usual defect, the common defect, the universal defect, the defect that has never been missing from any ship that ever sailed—­she has imperfect beds.  Many ships have good beds, but no ship has very good ones.  In the matter of beds all ships have been badly edited, ignorantly edited, from the beginning.  The selection of the beds is given to some hearty, strong-backed, self-made man, when it ought to be given to a frail woman accustomed from girlhood to backaches and insomnia.  Nothing is so rare, on either side of the ocean, as a perfect bed; nothing is so difficult to make.  Some of the hotels on both sides provide it, but no ship ever does or ever did.  In Noah’s Ark the beds were simply scandalous.  Noah set the fashion, and it will endure in one degree of modification or another till the next flood.

8 A.M.  Passing Isle de Bourbon.  Broken-up sky-line of volcanic mountains in the middle.  Surely it would not cost much to repair them, and it seems inexcusable neglect to leave them as they are.

It seems stupid to send tired men to Europe to rest.  It is no proper rest for the mind to clatter from town to town in the dust and cinders, and examine galleries and architecture, and be always meeting people and lunching and teaing and dining, and receiving worrying cables and letters.  And a sea voyage on the Atlantic is of no use—­voyage too short, sea too rough.  The peaceful Indian and Pacific Oceans and the long stretches of time are the healing thing.

May 2, am.  A fair, great ship in sight, almost the first we have seen in these weeks of lonely voyaging.  We are now in the Mozambique Channel, between Madagascar and South Africa, sailing straight west for Delagoa Bay.

Last night, the burly chief engineer, middle-aged, was standing telling a spirited seafaring tale, and had reached the most exciting place, where a man overboard was washing swiftly astern on the great seas, and uplifting despairing cries, everybody racing aft in a frenzy of excitement and fading hope, when the band, which had been silent a moment, began impressively its closing piece, the English national anthem.  As simply as if he was unconscious of what he was doing, he stopped his story, uncovered, laid his laced cap against his breast, and slightly bent his grizzled head.  The few bars finished, he put on his cap and took up his tale again, as naturally as if that interjection of music had been a part of it.  There was something touching and fine about it, and it was moving to reflect that he was one of a myriad, scattered over every part of the globe, who by turn was doing as he was doing every hour of the twenty-four—­those awake doing it while the others slept—­those impressive bars forever floating up out of the various climes, never silent and never lacking reverent listeners.