even spoke to the man at the wheel_? Now to come to the next point.
This correspondent girds at my having had a special cabin and a
special steward. _Why!_ the envious grumbler! if he had been as
specially unwell as I was--but there, I own I lose patience with
him--didn't I go out as a "Special," and if a Special doesn't have
everything special about him, _he is simply obtaining money under
false pretences_. I've a great mind--I hear the jeerer snigger in his
sleeve--but I repeat emphatically I have a great mind to come back.
"He will return, I know him well," my traducers may sing; and I
shall return when I consider my special work specially done in my own
special manner, and be blowed to em all, the detractors!

[Illustration: Grandolph confiding to the _Chef_ his secret receipt
for cooking a flying-fish.]

He grumbles because I had _a special portable light_ all to myself,
"when I wanted to play cards." Aha! do we see the cloven hoof now?
Was I to play cards _in the dark_? Those who know me best know that I
am all fair and above-board, and no hole-and-corner gambling for me.
And what tale has he to tell? Why that "_Another night, not using his
special light at the time, two other passengers began a game of chess
under its rays._" Which they had no right whatever to do. But I winked
at it, and when the first officer was coming his rounds I winked
at _them_; but this friendly act on my part they did not heed, and
consequently _to save them from being put in irons_ and confined in
the deepest dungeon beneath the _Grantully Castle_ moat, I "_came
along just then_," as he reports, "_and removed the lamp to another
part of the deck, leaving the chess-players in the dark_"--as if this
consequence were anything extraordinary when a lamp is removed! Why
any schoolboy, the merest tyro in Scripture History, knows where the