'The routine of the "Scourge" has grown familiar; and one tires of unbroken fine weather and smooth seas. No resource for me but the officers' little library. Therefore I must have been sleepily pouring over Dana's "Two Years before the Mast": a pleasant, rough kind of book, but with something too much hauling of ropes and "handing" of sails it in. ...I have been reading also "The Amber Witch", a most beautiful German story, translated into English, by Lady Duff Gordon.'