Chapter 4 — <br/> CHAPTER IV.<br/>

A dozen direct censures are easier to bear than one morganatic
compliment.

A dozen direct censures are easier to bear than one morganatic
compliment.

—Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.

Sailed from Honolulu.—From diary:

Sept. 2. Flocks of flying fish-slim, shapely, graceful, and intensely
white. With the sun on them they look like a flight of silver
fruit-knives. They are able to fly a hundred yards.

Sept. 3. In 9 deg. 50’ north latitude, at breakfast. Approaching the
equator on a long slant. Those of us who have never seen the equator are a
good deal excited. I think I would rather see it than any other thing in
the world. We entered the “doldrums” last night—variable winds,
bursts of rain, intervals of calm, with chopping seas and a wobbly and
drunken motion to the ship—a condition of things findable in other
regions sometimes, but present in the doldrums always. The globe-girdling
belt called the doldrums is 20 degrees wide, and the thread called the
equator lies along the middle of it.