father in the flesh. about England, child?" "What is your notion "I hardly know, papa. I must have a notion about you, first. You say I was born at sea: I feel just like a mermaid that has come ashore a fish out of water. I want to go on board the great steamer: I hope it will pass over the very place where I was born and poor mamma was buried." "No chance thereof, my child. We go back round Cape Horn." "I think I must begin to study geography," said Miranda. "It would be dreadful not to know Cape Horn when you saw it, and I am sure I shall not unless somebody gives me a likeness of it. Cape Horn is suggestive of an old woman in an old-fashioned cape, wearing horns." "Where lies the land to which the ship would go? THAT famous steamship, the Mighty Metropolis, carried about five hundred passengers, of whom nearly a hundred were in the saloon. A motley multitude, of course, and quite indescribable within the limits of three volumes. Still there are a few of them that deserve description. The passengers, however, must give place to the captain, Edward Grainger, a man six feet two inches high, whose battered figure-head, in its handsome ugliness, showed that in his time he had fought many ships through many storms. That osculation of ugliness and beauty is a curious case of my favourite dogma that extremes meet. Grainger was perfectly charming when he talked to a lady, and perfectly furious when he had to fight a hurricane. Now for a few of the passengers. There were our friends Harold and Miranda Tachbrook, and Tom Jones. There was an elderly gentleman named Wilson, with a wife and some dumpy daughters, and a very diamonded son. The father was going home to be knighted for something or other he had done in the colony. There was a Captain Stuart, dark-eyed and black-bearded, evidently one of those adventurous gentlemen who, like Ancient Pistol, regard the world as an oyster. Stuart was popular, for he could sing comic songs wonderfully, and there was not his equal on board at whist and écarté. There was a poet, Cincinnatus Meunier, who had the wildest eyes and wore the hugest watch-chain ever known. He had been wandering all over the world; had used up Western America and Southern Australia, and now thought he would try London. That city of giant brains may cure his poetic influenza. There were two pretty girls-twins-orphan daughters of an English gentleman named Mansard, who were going home to the care of their only relation, their maternal grandmother. The poor children, in their deep mourning, looked very unhappy. There was a rather frisky gentleman, called Leary, who showed from the first a decided disposition to be master of the ceremonies, and who started a daily newspaper (in manuscript, of course) called the Metropolitan. His first article was very fine. The sea is the mother of cities; where the water flows, bringing the masts of all nations, there will cities be built. Nowhere comes the sea without bringing civilisation as well as iodine. We are now on the sea. The Mighty Metropolis may be considered as a city, though rather small in girth—a moving city, even as the earth is a travelling planet. Its king is the captain; its archbishop is the chaplain; its premier is the first officer; its Times is the Metropolitan." There was a good deal more of this sort of thing; and it was generally agreed among the passengers, that unless a deputation from the Times met Mr Leary the moment he landed in England, offering him any sum he liked to mention for articles, the leading journal of Europe would have decidedly neglected its duty. There were several families of plutocratic position, who had picked up gold enough in Australia to make them very brilliant in England. To them, of course, it occurred not that birth or rank or culture are, even in the England of to-day, thought more of than gold. There was Jack Manly, whose father had sent him out with eight thousand pounds, and who had come back with eighty, and a considerable contempt for the climate. There was Harry Loraine, who had gone out just to see what Australia was like, and who went back to his chambers in the Albany with a well-founded conviction that Piccadilly was preferable to Collins Street, where every Melbourne gentleman lounges on summer afternoons, when the ladies are abroad. Australians know how to enjoy their December midsummer. were many more, some of whom there occasion to name; but these were the most prominent in the saloon group. There may be persons When people are shut up together in large |