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said, surprised, “What do you mean by lugging this thing up here, Chips?” — “Captain’s orders, sir,” he explained shortly.
    I did not like to question him further, and so we only exchanged Christmas greetings and he went away. The next person to speak to me was the steward. He came running up the companion stairs: “Have you any old newspapers in your room, sir?”
    We had left Sydney, N.S.W., eighteen days before. There were several old Sydney Heralds, Telegraphs, Bulletins in my cabin, besides a few new home papers received by the last mail. “Why do you ask, steward?” I inquired naturally. “The captain would like to have them,” he said.
    And even then I did not understand the inwardness of these eccentricities. I was only lost in astonishment at them. It was eight o’clock before we had closed with that ship, which, under her short canvas and heading nowhere in particular, seemed to be loafing aimlessly on the very threshold of the gloomy home of storms. But long before that hour I had learned from the number of the boats she carried that this nonchalant ship was a whaler. She was the first
    whaler I had ever seen. She had hoisted the Stars and Stripes at her peak, and her signal flags had told us already that her name was: “Alaska — two years our from New York — east from Honolulu — two hundred and fifteen days on the cruising ground.”
    We passed, sailing slowly, within a hundred yards of her; and just as our steward started ringing the breakfast bell the captain and I had aloft, in good view of the figures watching us over her stern, the keg, properly headed up and containing, besides an enormous bundle of old newspaper, two boxes of figs in honour of the day. We flung it far out over the rail. Instantly our ship, sliding down the slope of a high swell, left it far behind in our wake. On board the Alaska a man in a fur cap flourished an arm; another, a much a be-whiskered person, ran forward suddenly. I never saw anything so ready and so smart as the way that whaler, rolling desperately all the time, lowered one of her boats. The Southern Ocean went on tossing the two ships like a juggler his gilt balls, and the microscopic white speck of the boat seemed to come into the game instantly, as if shot out from a catapult on the enormous and lonely stage. That Yankee whaler lost not a moment in picking up her Christmas present from the English wool clipper.
    Before we had increased the distance very much she dipped her ensign in thanks and asked to be reported “All well, a catch of three fish.” I suppose it paid them for two hundred and fifteen days of risk and toil, away from the sounds and sights of the inhabitated world, like outcasts devoted, beyond the confines of mankind’s life, to some enchanted and lonely penance.
    Christmas Days at sea are of varied character, fair to middling and down to plainly atrocious. In this statement I do not include Christmas Days on board passenger ships. A passenger is, of course, a brother (or sister), and quite a nice person in a way, but his Christmas Days are, I suppose, what he wants them to be: the conventional festivities of an expensive hotel included in the price of his ticket.
     

OCEAN TRAVEL
     
    The one statement that can safely be advanced about travelling at sea is that it is not what is used to be. It is different now elementally. It is not so much a matter of changed propelling power; it is something more. In the old days, under the machinery of sails, the distinguished and the undistinguished travellers (of whom there were not so very many) were wafted to distant parts of the world by the movement of variable air currents. Now the travelling multitudes are taken to their destination because of the invariable resistance of water to the screwing motion of the propeller, with which fire (that other element) has a lot to do. The whole affair of progress the seas has become much more complicated and much more precise on its physical side. It has grown also into a marvel.
    But a marvellous achievement is not necessarily interesting. It may render life more tame than perhaps it should be. I do not mean that any marvel of applied science can tame the wild spirit that lurks in all men, and of which the proofs are not far to seek. It only makes the condition of our pilgrimage less exciting.
    The whole psychology of sea travel is changed. Formerly a man setting out of a sea voyage broke away from shore conditions and found in the ship a