passed his brush dipped in this liquid once or twice, very lightly and gracefully over my chin. Then with the utmost dexterity he scraped all the lather off with his wooden razor. My companions came next, and I was glad to be let off, for to crown the joke, as I had expected, Neptune ordered baptism, and instantly a deluge of water descended. Well soaked, my poor brothers fled to the quarter-deck, where the sisters stood watching the games without having to undergo the inconvenience of them. Neptune and his companions then engaged in a combat with buckets of water. When they were tired and wet through, they all went and put on their best clothes, and then performed a series of dances, each more ridiculous than the rest, and for the remainder of the day they were playing all kinds of pranks on one another, but all goodnaturedly.
On the 28th a storm was brewing in the bosom of the calm. It burst on the 29th but was of short duration. Wednesday, March ist, the north wind brought back a clear sky. At six in the evening we perceived three ships on the horizon, two of which in the north by a peculiar chance seemed to touch the ruddy disk of the setting sun, making a very pretty sight. At about eleven o'clock I observed a phenomenon in the nature of a shooting-star. The north wind was blowing with moderate force, thin white clouds were scattered over the sky, when all at once a disk of fire appeared in the blue part of the sky, about half way up from the horizon, and remained visible for five or six seconds. It was a foot in diameter and as bright as an ordinary meteor. Half of the lower edge resembled a perfect crescent, of a deep violet color. As the meteor slowly advanced, a beard of writhing reddish flames, half an inch wide by a foot and a half long, formed beneath the crescent, while two purple beams shot out from the two sides of the beard to a length of some twelve feet. Having reached this size they faded and were no