LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume III, Issue 247, 25 March 1875, Page 3

LITERATURE.

A CHRISTMAS DINNER IN THE BAY OF BISCAY. [From the Gentleman's Magazine.] It was last Christmas Day, the table-cloth was laid in the saloon of a mail steamboat, and the place was the Bay of Biscay. We left .Southampton at noon on the 24th of December, 1873, and we were on our way to the Brazils, touching at Corunna, Card, and Lisbon. Twelve hours before embarkation I had no more idea of spending Christmas Day in the Bay of Biscay than of sending up my plate for roast beef at the North Pole. In fact, my bachelor friends without domestic ties were'invited, and had accepted the invitation, an.l with them and my wife and little ones 1 intended to dine and spend the evening of the twenty-fifth in strict accordance with tradition and national taste. The reality was very different. 'We want you, Mr P ,togo to Lisbon and Madeira, and to do there whatever is required to ensure the speedy transmission of our enrrespondence from the Gold Coast. The mail steamer leaves Southampton tomorrow at twelve.' These were my sudden and unchallengeable instractions, and thus it was that I found myself sitting down to dinner in the midst of the Bay of Biscay at five o'clock on the 25th day of last December.

We were a melancholy party. It was not the roughness of the sea or the motion of the ship. There was not a bit of a swell on. As smooth as landsman's heart could desire were the waters of that dreaded four hundred miles of open ocean between Ushant and Ortegal. Our boat was as steady as a castle. There was no cause of discomfort on board. Indeed we should have been thankful for a little hardship. Our grievance, I think, was the delusive decoration of the saloon with holly, the menu of roast turkey, plum-pudding, and mince pies—the hollow mockeries of an old English Christmas dinner at home-so well intended

by steward and cook. These things taunted us of the unlucky destiny which sent us into the middle of the lonely seas to spend our Christmas night. They set us picturing the dear family circles from which we had run away. We took our places one and all without speaking a word. The captain, at the head of the table, wore the pensive air of a family man. Two ' exploiters' bound for the Brazils had been roughened by hard experience, but they were touched in a tender part at this moment of sitting down to Christmas dinner in the midst of strangers on the desolate seas. Two engineers from Yorkshire, who had been cheerfulness itself till now, were suddenly mute as fishes. Presently, whenjjthe fish, which I had just managed to taste, was taken away, and the turkey was being handed round, a Brazilianbound stranger made a desperate attempt to force a conversation. ' Thinking of the children, I suppose," said he to the captain. ' Haven't got any,' replied the captain, with pensive gravity. Never was a failure more signal. The well-meaning inquirer gave it up, and again silence reigned supreme. There was nothing to fix the attention but the slight creaking of the ship and the swaying of the glassrack over the table. The turkey would not go down, for every one of us had a lump in the throat less digestible than anything the steward could give us. When the few words which had been uttered had passed almost out of recollection, and we were all mentally hundreds of miles away, the captain added, in the same serious and semi-tragical air : " I've got some little nephews and neices, though,' by way of explaining that he understood the the tone of mind of his guests, and was not altogether outside the range of sympathy. It was just when the plum-pudding made its appearance, and when our young children should have been clapping their little hands round our tables, that an awful discovery was made, There were just thirteen of us at dinner ! Darker grew and deeper the silence and the gloom. But the subject was in a manner congenial. Here was dismal ground on which we could all meet. The captain began to tell stories of what had occurred within his own experience, and what his father before him had told of the events associated with the sitting down of that unlucky number at table, more especially on a great day like this in the calendar. Such was the impression, I honestly avow, of those stories upon my mind, that when some months afterwards I saw on the London newspaper placards ' Wreck of a Royal Mail Steamer, 1 I found myself saying— ■ Ah, that must be our unlucky boat.' lam glad to say my prevision was wrong ; but the lost vessel was one belonging to the same house. My own poor little contribution to the melancholy batch of superstitious recollections was derived from an occasion when a dozen of us were dining at an hotel at Bath, and a thirteenth unexpectedly arrived—a gentleman known and much esteemed by the twelve. ' Here comes the victim,' was the remark made as the thirteenth man sat down—and within three months that thirteenth man was dead. Now, I had never heard that the last arrival was necessarily the victim, and I was endeavoring to remove any particularly pointed application of the narrative by the well-worn argument that out of a general company of thirteen middleaged men it was not so very unlikely that one might die in the course of twelve months irrespective of the magic potency of fatal numbers ; but somehow my philosophy did not mend the matter. After all the idea was not absolutely exhiliarating that the chances might be in favor of at least one of this small party dying before Christmas Day, 1874. Pondering wofully on this point, I glanced surreptitiously towards the seat which had been occupied by the thirteenth to sit down to his saloon dinner— and the place was vacant. The circumstances of the hour had been nearly enough for every one of us ; the story of the thirteenth finished the Christmas dinner of 1873 for him. He lived three days longer, to my certain knowledge, and I trust he is good for a far happier dinner on the twentyfifth of this present month ; but it must be admitted that the odds on that mournful day were against him. 'Dinner was over, but we could not say we had dined. The pudding had been tasted for the sake of ' the children,' but we were glad when it was all over. ; The passengers, one by one, slunk away almost unobserved to their berths. No one made the attempt even to appear cheerful. I believe I could have worked myself into a something resembling placid enjoyment of a cigar on deck with the genial Irish doctor, but just then, as he told me, we were steaming very near the spot where the London went down ! This was one too much for one Christmas day, and I gave it up, and went off like the rest to my cabin to mix up in dreams the thirteenth arrival at dinner, the children, and the wreck of the London. It is astonishing how cheerful we all were next morning. We had got over Christmas day, and had run through the Bay and were ploughing along joyfully at the _ rate of twelve knots off the coast of Spain. Not one of us on board, I think, would have exchanged places on that Boxing Day with those dyspeptic friends at home whose too cheerful spirits had so haunted us the day before. We were braced up and renewed for the business, full of interest and novelty, that lay before most of us. But if the fates will let me eat my Christmas dinner at home in this current December I expect some sort of recompense in double merriment for that melancholy dinner hour in the Bay of Biscay on the twenty-fifth of December. P.