Volume 1

Lusitanian sketches of the pen and pencil / By William H.G. Kingston.

  • Kingston, William Henry Giles, 1814-1880.
Date:
1845
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lusitanian sketches of the pen and pencil / By William H.G. Kingston. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    is best suited to the purpose of holding a change of clothes, as it stows easily away under the berth, being far superior to that destroyer of coats and cravats, that republican container of clean shirts and blackened boots, pocket-hankerchiefs and brushes, a carpet-bag, into which one may fruitlessly rummage for what is required till the search is abandoned in despair and sea-sickness. At that time the vessels started on Saturday, touch- ing at Falmouth to take in the London mails, by which the voyage was unnecessarily prolonged a day. After parting from a large circle of kindred I went on board, and, punctual to the hour, as I shook a brother’s hand, the steamer cast off from the pier- head, and glided quickly down the lovely Southampton Water. In the morning we had passed several yachts belonging to some friends of mine, getting under weigh for one of the west country regattas. How I longed to be on board instead of in a “rattling, roaring, screeching, smoking, paddling steamer !11 There is a feeling of such thorough independence in one’s own yacht, nothing to say one nay,—except the elements and the quarantine officers, by the by. One may justly sing: “We are rovers where’er rolls the fetterless sea; For the boundless blue ocean was made for the free.” I never feel so like a monarch (of rather a small kingdom, I confess) as when walking the deck of my vessel before breakfast I put the question, “ Where shall we sail to-day ? ” that is, when the weather is