I need hardly say that, with my predisposed necessitarian viscera, all these infallible remedies failed of any effect, except to aggravate my case. Nothing short of liquid lead, maybe, or potable plaster of Paris, would have proved a settler.
Happy the man who hath never been driven in his despair to test, detest, invoke, evoke, swallow, and unswallow, such drugs and draughts of the naval Pharmacopœia! Thrice happy civic simpleton who hath never learned how the rudder revolveth, at the risk of turning round himself!
Vandergroot is visibly in course of transformation. At every visit to the cabin he looks more and more like a Dutch-pin. He talks to me roundly, and gets blunter and blunter! The last time I felt, I had no small to my back. If I may guess at my own figure, it is now about an oval. I must look like one of Leda’s babies, just emerged, with their insignificant buds of legs and arms, from the egg! From an oval to a circle is but a step. Heaven help me when I get landed, round and sound, as they say of cherries! How shall I get home—how get up—(there will be a short way down)—mine own stairs? How shall I sit? Instead of my old library chair, I must borrow its three-legged stool of the terrestrial globe!
Either my head swims, or the cabin is getting circular! I shall roll about in it like a bolus in its box! If I am not merely giddy, I am already as spherical as the earth; a little flatted, or so, that is, towards the poles. What a horrible rough calm! I will down on my knees, if I have knees, and with clasped hands, if hands remain to me, pray, beg, and supplicate for a dismal storm to batter me into shape again, though it be but nine-bobble-square!
I get more and more candid and communicative every moment. I can keep nothing to myself: you shall have my whole heart. I abhor, loathe, execrate, the sea! If I could throw up my hat, my cry would be “Land for ever!” A fico for Tom Tough! Down with Duncan Howe, and Jervis! No Dibdin!
If ever I get ashore, able to chalk upon a wall, you shall read—Ask for Stoke Pogis! Try Lupton Parva! If ever I get to a dry desk again, to write verse upon,—and the poetry of the ocean is all on the land, its prose only upon the sea, you shall have a rare new melody, published by Power, to some such strain as this:—
The sea! the D——!
The terrible horrible sea!
The stormy, tumbling,