In the month of July we were ready for sea again. In the meantime Captain Ward had got together a new list of passengers, and we more than doubled our numbers by the addition of several Roman Catholic gentlemen of birth and education with their followers, and a party of Orangemen and their families, of a rather rough farming sort, escaping from religious feuds and hostile neighbours. A blooming widow Culleeney, of the former class, was added to the scanty female society on board; and for the first few hours after leaving port, we had fun and dancing on deck galore. But alas, sea-sickness put an end to our merriment all too soon. Our new recruits fled below, and scarcely showed their faces on deck for several days. Yet, in this apparently quiet interval, discord had found her way between decks.

We were listening one fine evening to the comical jokes and rich brogue of the most gentlemanly of the Irish Catholics above-mentioned, when suddenly a dozen men, women and children, armed with sticks and foaming at the mouth, rushed up the steerage hatchway, and without note of warning or apparent provocation, attacked the defenceless group standing near us with the blindness of insanity and the most frantic cries of rage. Fortunately there were several of the ship's officers and sailors on deck, who laid about them lustily with their fists, and speedily drove the attacking party below, where they were confined for some days, under a threat of severe punishment from the captain, who meant what he said. So this breeze passed over. What it was about, who was offended, and how, we never could discover; we set it down to the general principle, that the poor creatures were merely 'blue-mowlded for want of a bating.'

Moderately fair breezes, occasional dead calms, rude, baffling head-winds, attended us until we reached the Gulf of St. Lawrence. After sailing all day northward, and all night southerly, we found ourselves next morning actually retrograded some thirty or forty knots. But we were rewarded sometimes by strange sights and wondrous spectacles. Once a shoal of porpoises and grampuses crossed our course, frolicking and turning summersets in the air, and continuing to stream onwards for full two hours. Another time, when far north, we had the most magnificent display of aurora borealis. Night after night the sea became radiant with phosphorescent light. Icebergs attended us in thousands, compelling our captain to shorten sail frequently; once we passed near two of these ice-cliffs which exceeded five hundred feet in height, and again we were nearly overwhelmed by the sudden break-down of a huge mass as big as a cathedral. Near the Island of Anticosti we saw at least three hundred spouting whales at one view. I have crossed the Atlantic four times since, and have scarcely seen a single whale or shark. It seems that modern steamship travel has driven away the inhabitants of the deep to quieter seas, and robbed "life on the ocean wave" of much of its romance.