[387] round the Cape. A leaf from his journal will show what he was doing in that respect.
Tuesday, June 26h. —Forenoon below; finished the first volume of Macaulay's England. I am glad to say that, in spite of the contrary predictions of my friends before I left home, I have not as yet neglected my reading and study, though my time has been much more limited than I expected, and consequently I have not accomplished nearly all that I could wish. Greek and Latin I have kept at with a constancy of which, under all the circumstances,—hard work and scarcity of rest,—I think I may be justly proud. I find that I have lost none of my ability to read them easily, but from the want of grammars I feel that my knowledge of them is not nearly so exact as it once was. The Holy Bible,—the reading of which has been a daily duty and pleasure to me,—John Foster, De Quincey, Macaulay, Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Dickens have formed my leisure reading, if that time which I have stolen from my sleep can be called leisure. I can fairly say that they have been my greatest pleasure ever since I left home. I hope that a year's time, and possibly less, will see me again so situated that the bulk of my time, and not the spare minutes only, may be given up to them. I have been like the mother in Tom Hood's “Lost child,” who did not know the love she felt for her child till she lost it. I only hope that I may not, like her, forget it as soon as I find it. July 7, 1860.—Relaxed my rule to-day, and neither studied nor did any other useful thing, but enjoyed my pipe and dolce far niente, reading “ Verdant Green,” &c., the first instance of the kind aboard the Rival; I thought that I was entitled to a single holiday. July 10.—Did not continue my Latin this P. M., having finished Cicero de Amicitia; yesterday, but spent the afternoon in my bunk reading Herschel's Astronomy. July 11.—Read my regular four pages of Demosthenes this A. M. July 27.—Have dropped Latin and Greek for a while, having got hold of Bowditch's Navigator.I have given prominence to this fact, because it well illustrates his perseverance and his real love for study, that he should pursue it so persistently under circumstances so unfavorable. It is needless to say that he did not neglect other duties for this, because that would be impossible aboard ship. It was not mere reading that he performed, but hard study. Nor