CHAPTER I

Summary

‘Once more upon the waters, yet once more,’ and so on. We are now fairly off for eighteen months' of travelling by steamers, tents, and mountains—and every day of a cabin seems to me like so much waste. They ought all to go to the great account of the long voyage that will, at last, take us home again. And this cabin looks so like my ‘Jupiter’ abode, in all its fittings and appointments, that it is really a pity to throw its discomforts away in going farther off. Well, I am sure it is all for the best—I make no objection—I like to see things take their course; but still I do say, that for a person who required nothing but to be allowed the undisturbed enjoyment of that small Greenwich house and garden, with all its little Cockney pleasures and pursuits, I have been very hardly treated and rather over-worked. We got up at five this morning; the servants were all in a fuss, and Wright was in all the delusions of carpet-bags and nice bandboxes in which she may be indulged till we leave the steamer, and then she will be obliged to wake from them, as the coolie is yet to be discovered who would carry a carpetbag, and a bandbox does not precisely meet the views of a camel.