To be honest, it is most
unpleasant on deck, rainy with a damp, hot wind blowing, and the
music-room is crowded and stuffy beyond words, or I might not be
unselfish enough to remain with G. I did go up, and a fat person,
whose nurse was ill, gave me her baby to hold, a poor white-faced,
fretful baby, who pulled down all my hair, and I have had the
unpleasant task of doing it up again. If you have ever stood in a very
hot greenhouse with the door shut, and wrestled with something above
your head, you will know what I felt.
We passed Aden yesterday and stopped for a few hours to coal. That
was the limit. The sun beating down on the deck, the absence of the
slightest breeze, coal-dust sifting into everything--ouf! Aden's
barren rocks reminded me rather of the Skye Coolin. I wonder if they
are climbable. I haven't troubled you much, have I, with accounts
of the entertainments on board? but I think I must tell you about a
whistling competition we had the other day. You must know that we had
each a partner, and the women sat at one end of the deck and the men
stood at the other and were told the tune they had to whistle, when
they rushed to us and each whistled his tune to his partner, who had
to write the name on a piece of paper and hand it back, and the man
who got back to the umpire first won--at least his partner did. Do you
understand? Well, as you know, I haven't much ear for music, and I
hoped I would get an easy tune; but when my partner, a long, thin,
earnest man, with a stutter, burst on me and whistled wildly in my
face, I had the hopeless feeling that I had never heard the tune
before.
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