“WHY I’M OFF WITH ALL MY MASTER’S.”
That pastoral reminiscence hath made me worse. It has given me an appetite—for acres. Methinks I yearn and long and crave for nice clay, delicious mould, and crisp pebbles, in a paroxysm of that strange bulimy that attacks the African Dirt Eater. Something of Nebuchadnezzar’s grazing propensity comes along with it. Gracious Heaven! can it be possible that, after having been battered and shaken out of all shape,—a mere mass of living flesh, like the unlicked ursine cub,—this same Circean Jung Vrouw has taken it into her figure-head to beat, bang, bump, and rumbledy-thump me into another form, a horse, a ram, or a brindled bull!
Thrice brute and beast-hyæna! Were-wolf! Dragon! horned Devil! that thou wast, my Land-steward, Peter Stuckey! after counselling me before thy last audit to abate my rents, to volunteer to reduce them thyself by absconding, across sea, with the whole receipt! Thrice Soland goose, booby, noddy, sea-calf, land-donkey, and loggerhead turtle was I, thus impoverished, instead of economising, to pursue thee on an element where I cannot control my out-goings!
Donner and Blitzen! what a crash! my rash prayer was heard: there is a storm coming—as the Powers proposed to storm Angiers in King John’s days—from all the four quarters at once! I must needs turn in: but how vilely this bed is made
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 with the foot two yards higher than the head! No, the head is highest—perpendicular. I designed to lie down, and here I am standing bolt erect on my heels—no, on my head. It must be getting cold: the very trunks, stools and tables are making a move towards the stove—nay, now we are in some sudden peril, for they are all doing their best to rush up the cabin-stair. Whew—that sea last shipped must needs have put all the Dutchmen’s pipes out. Another plunge; and a flood of brine soaks me through, shirt, sheet, and blankets. There is no washing put out here, I perceive; ’tis all done at home. What a complex, chaotic motion,—the ship tosses and flings like a wild desert-born horse, that is trying to rear, kick up behind, turn round and round, and roll on his back at one and the same moment. This is no Dutch ship, but a Dutch fair—with the drums, gongs, speaking-trumpets, and other discords, all braying together; and I am on the rocking-horse, the round-about, in the up-and-down, and each of the swings, all at once! Another crash! The Jung Vrouw is bereaved of her little one, alias the long-boat. How kind of Vandergroot to come down to tell me of it, direct through the sky-light, instead of going round by the stair! How kind of that table, lying on its back, to catch him in its legs! Angels of grace be near us! He tells me, as he sways up and down, partly in High, partly in Low Dutch, that the Jung Vrouw herself is washed overboard! But no—I misconstrued him. ’Tis only her great ruddy staring figure-head—which the blundering Holland shipwrights had stuck astern, on the crown of the tiller—that is gone adrift. Oh how I wish from my soul of souls that I could see the Commodore of the Thames Yachts now pulling, within hail, in the Wenus! Or, the last Dibdin taking a chair—or the chair taking him—in this cabin! Or, Campbell essaying to write down a new sea-song on yon topsy-turvy table! And oh! to behold the author of “The deep deep Sea” sitting on the poop, singing to that
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 floating Young Woman’s head and bust, taken by mistake for a mermaid’s!
Another shout. Pieter Pietersoon, in heaving the lead, hath chucked himself in along with it! I do not wonder; he heaveth after my own fashion, by wholesale. Have I not within the last two hours rejected, discharged, and utterly cast from me in disgust, the whole ocean, nay all the oceans, German, Atlantic, Pacific—the Arctic last, its solid calms, the next best things to Terra Firma, not so violently disagreeing with me as the rest. And do I not know and feel that I am now about to give up Neptune, trident and all, with the whole salt-water mythol............