Transcribed from the 1905 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk




ESSAYS OF TRAVEL




Contents

THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT:  FROM THE CLYDE TO SANDY HOOK
   THE SECOND CABIN
   EARLY IMPRESSION
   STEERAGE IMPRESSIONS
   STEERAGE TYPES
   THE SICK MAN
   THE STOWAWAYS
   PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND REVIEW
   NEW YORK
COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK
   COCKERMOUTH
   AN EVANGELIST
   ANOTHER
   LAST OF SMETHURST
AN AUTUMN EFFECT
A WINTER'S WALK IN CARRICK AND GALLOWAY
FOREST NOTES -
   ON THE PLAINS
   IN THE SEASON
   IDLE HOURS
   A PLEASURE-PARTY
   THE WOODS IN SPRING
   MORALITY
A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE
RANDOM MEMORIES:  ROSA QUO LOCORUM
THE IDEAL HOUSE
DAVOS IN WINTER
HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS
ALPINE DIVERSION
THE STUMULATION OF THE ALPS
ROADS
ON THE ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES



CHAPTER I--THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT



THE SECOND CABIN


I first encountered my fellow-passengers on the Broomielaw in
Glasgow.  Thence we descended the Clyde in no familiar spirit, but
looking askance on each other as on possible enemies.  A few
Scandinavians, who had already grown acquainted on the North Sea,
were friendly and voluble over their long pipes; but among English
speakers distance and suspicion reigned supreme.  The sun was soon
overclouded, the wind freshened and grew sharp as we continued to
descend the widening estuary; and with the falling temperature the
gloom among the passengers increased.  Two of the women wept.  Any
one who had come aboard might have supposed we were all absconding
from the law.  There was scarce a word interchanged, and no common
sentiment but that of cold united us, until at length, having
touched at Greenock, a pointing arm and a rush to the starboard now
announced that our ocean steamer was in sight.  There she lay in
mid-river, at the Tail of the Bank, her sea-signal flying:  a wall
of bulwark, a street of white deck-houses, an aspiring forest of
spars, larger than a church, and soon to be as populous as many an
incorporated town in the land to which she was to bear us.

I was not, in truth, a steerage passenger.  Although anxious to see
the worst of emigrant life, I had some work to finish on the
voyage, and was advised to go by the second cabin, where at least I
should have a table at command.  The advice was excellent; but to
understand the choice, and what I gained, some outline of the
internal disposition of the ship will first be necessary.  In her
very nose is Steerage No. 1, down two pair of stairs.  A little
abaft, another companion, labelled Steerage No. 2 and 3, gives
admission to three galleries, two running forward towards Steerage
No. 1, and the third aft towards the engines.  The starboard
forward gallery is the second cabin.  Away abaft the engines and
below the officers' cabins, to complete our survey of the vessel,
there is yet a third nest of steerages, labelled 4 and 5.  The
second cabin, to return, is thus a modified oasis in the very heart
of the steerages.  Through the thin partition you can hear the
steerage passengers being sick, the rattle of tin dishes as they
sit at meals, the varied accents in which they converse, the crying
of their children terrified by this new experience, or the clean
flat smack of the parental hand in chastisement.

There are, however, many advantages for the inhabitant of this
strip.  He does not require to bring his own bedding or dishes, but
finds berths and a table completely if somewhat roughly furnished.
He enjoys a distinct superiority in diet; but this, strange to say,
differs not only on different ships, but on the same ship according
as her head is to the east or west.  In my own experience, the
principal difference between our table and that of the true
steerage passenger was the table itself, and the crockery plates
from which we ate.  But lest I should show myself ungrateful, let
me recapitulate every advantage.  At breakfast we had a choice
between tea and coffee for beverage; a choice not easy to make, the
two were so surprisingly alike.  I found that I could sleep after
the coffee and lay awake after the tea, which is proof conclusive
of some chemical disparity; and even by the palate I could
distinguish a smack of snuff in the former from a flavour of
boiling and dish-cloths in the second.  As a matter of fact, I have
seen passengers, after many sips, still doubting which had been
supplied them.  In the way of eatables at the same meal we were
gloriously favoured; for in addition to porridge, which was common
to all, we had Irish stew, sometimes a bit of fish, and sometimes
rissoles.  The dinner of soup, roast fresh beef, boiled salt junk,
and potatoes, was, I believe, exactly common to the steerage and
the second cabin; only I have heard it rumoured that our potatoes
were of a superior brand; and twice a week, on pudding-days,
instead of duff, we had a saddle-bag filled with currants under the
name of a plum-pudding.  At tea we were served with some broken
meat from the saloon; sometimes in the comparatively elegant form
of spare patties or rissoles; but as a general thing mere chicken-
bones and flakes of fish, neither hot nor cold.  If these were not
the scrapings of plates their looks belied them sorely; yet we were
all too hungry to be proud, and fell to these leavings greedily.
These, the bread, which was excellent, and the soup and porridge
which were both good, formed my whole diet throughout the voyage;
so that except for the broken meat and the convenience of a table I
might as well have been in the steerage outright.  Had they given
me porridge again in the evening, I should have been perfectly
contented with the fare.  As it was, with a few biscuits and some
whisky and water before turning in, I kept my body going and my
spirits up to the mark.

The last particular in which the second cabin passenger remarkably
stands ahead of his brother of the steerage is one altogether of
sentiment.  In the steerage there are males and females; in the
second cabin ladies and gentlemen.  For some time after I came
aboard I thought I was only a male; but in the course of a voyage
of discovery between decks, I came on a brass plate, and learned
that I was still a gentleman.  Nobody knew it, of course.  I was
lost in the crowd of males and females, and rigorously confined to
the same quarter of the deck.  Who could tell whether I housed on
the port or starboard side of steerage No. 2 and 3?  And it was
only there that my superiority became practical; everywhere else I
was incognito, moving among my inferiors with simplicity, not so
much as a swagger to indicate that I was a gentleman after all, and
had broken meat to tea.  Still, I was like one with a patent of
nobility in a drawer at home; and when I felt out of spirits I
could go down and refresh myself with a look of that brass plate.

For all these advantages I paid but two guineas.  Six guineas is
the steerage fare; eight that by the second cabin; and when you
remember that the steerage passenger must supply bedding and
dishes, and, in five cases out of ten, either brings some dainties
with him, or privately pays the steward for extra rations, the
difference in price becomes almost nominal.  Air comparatively fit
to breathe, food comparatively varied, and the satisfaction of
being still privately a gentleman, may thus be had almost for the
asking.  Two of my fellow-passengers in the second cabin had
already made the passage by the cheaper fare, and declared it was
an experiment not to be repeated.  As I go on to tell about my
steerage friends, the reader will perceive that they were not alone
in their opinion.  Out of ten with whom I was more or less
intimate, I am sure not fewer than five vowed, if they returned, to
travel second cabin; and all who had left their wives behind them
assured me they would go without the comfort of their presence
until they could afford to bring them by saloon.

Our party in the second cabin was not perhaps the most interesting
on board.  Perhaps even in the saloon there was as much good-will
and character.  Yet it had some elements of curiosity.  There was a
mixed group of Swedes, Danes, and Norsemen, one of whom, generally
known by the name of 'Johnny,' in spite of his own protests,
greatly diverted us by his clever, cross-country efforts to speak
English, and became on the strength of that an universal favourite-
-it takes so little in this world of shipboard to create a
popularity.  There was, besides, a Scots mason, known from his
favourite dish as 'Irish Stew,' three or four nondescript Scots, a
fine young Irishman, O'Reilly, and a pair of young men who deserve
a special word of condemnation.  One of them was Scots; the other
claimed to be American; admitted, after some fencing, that he was
born in England; and ultimately proved to be an Irishman born and
nurtured, but ashamed to own his country.  He had a sister on
board, whom he faithfully neglected throughout the voyage, though
she was not only sick, but much his senior, and had nursed and
cared for him in childhood.  In appearance he was like an imbecile
Henry the Third of France.  The Scotsman, though perhaps as big an
ass, was not so dead of heart; and I have only bracketed them
together because they were fast friends, and disgraced themselves
equally by their conduct at the table.

Next, to turn to topics more agreeable, we had a newly-married
couple, devoted to each other, with a pleasant story of how they
had first seen each other years ago at a preparatory school, and
that very afternoon he had carried her books home for her.  I do
not know if this story will be plain to southern readers; but to me
it recalls many a school idyll, with wrathful swains of eight and
nine confronting each other stride-legs, flushed with jealousy; for
to carry home a young lady's books was both a delicate attention
and a privilege.

Then there was an old lady, or indeed I am not sure that she was as
much old as antiquated and strangely out of place, who had left her
husband, and was travelling all the way to Kansas by herself.  We
had to take her own word that she was married; for it was sorely
contradicted by the testimony of her appearance.  Nature seemed to
have sanctified her for the single state; even the colour of her
hair was incompatible with matrimony, and her husband, I thought,
should be a man of saintly spirit and phantasmal bodily presence.
She was ill, poor thing; her soul turned from the viands; the dirty
tablecloth shocked her like an impropriety; and the whole strength
of her endeavour was bent upon keeping her watch true to Glasgow
time till she should reach New York.  They had heard reports, her
husband and she, of some unwarrantable disparity of hours between
these two cities; and with a spirit commendably scientific, had
seized on this occasion to put them to the proof.  It was a good
thing for the old lady; for she passed much leisure time in
studying the watch.  Once, when prostrated by sickness, she let it
run down.  It was inscribed on her harmless mind in letters of
adamant that the hands of a watch must never be turned backwards;
and so it behoved her to lie in wait for the exact moment ere she
started it again.  When she imagined this was about due, she sought
out one of the young second-cabin Scotsmen, who was embarked on the
same experiment as herself and had hitherto been less neglectful.
She was in quest of two o'clock; and when she learned it was
already seven on the shores of Clyde, she lifted up her voice and
cried 'Gravy!'  I had not heard this innocent expletive since I was
a young child; and I suppose it must have been the same with the
other Scotsmen present, for we all laughed our fill.

Last but not least, I come to my excellent friend Mr. Jones.  It
would be difficult to say whether I was his right-hand man, or he
mine, during the voyage.  Thus at table I carved, while he only
scooped gravy; but at our concerts, of which more anon, he was the
president who called up performers to sing, and I but his messenger
who ran his errands and pleaded privately with the over-modest.  I
knew I liked Mr. Jones from the moment I saw him.  I thought him by
his face to be Scottish; nor could his accent undeceive me.  For as
there is a lingua franca of many tongues on the moles and in the
feluccas of the Mediterranean, so there is a free or common accent
among English-speaking men who follow the sea.  They catch a twang
in a New England Port; from a cockney skipper, even a Scotsman
sometimes learns to drop an h; a word of a dialect is picked up
from another band in the forecastle; until often the result is
undecipherable, and you have to ask for the man's place of birth.
So it was with Mr. Jones.  I thought him a Scotsman who had been
long to sea; and yet he was from Wales, and had been most of his
life a blacksmith at an inland forge; a few years in America and
half a score of ocean voyages having sufficed to modify his speech
into the common pattern.  By his own account he was both strong and
skilful in his trade.  A few years back, he had been married and
after a fashion a rich man; now the wife was dead and the money
gone.  But his was the nature that looks forward, and goes on from
one year to another and through all the extremities of fortune
undismayed; and if the sky were to fall to-morrow, I should look to
see Jones, the day following, perched on a step-ladder and getting
things to rights.  He was always hovering round inventions like a
bee over a flower, and lived in a dream of patents.  He had with
him a patent medicine, for instance, the composition of which he
had bought years ago for five dollars from an American pedlar, and
sold the other day for a hundred pounds (I think it was) to an
English apothecary.  It was called Golden Oil, cured all maladies
without exception; and I am bound to say that I partook of it
myself with good results.  It is a character of the man that he was
not only perpetually dosing himself with Golden Oil, but wherever
there was a head aching or a finger cut, there would be Jones with
his bottle.

If he had one taste more strongly than another, it was to study
character.  Many an hour have we two walked upon the deck
dissecting our neighbours in a spirit that was too purely
scientific to be called unkind; whenever a quaint or human trait
slipped out in conversation, you might have seen Jones and me
exchanging glances; and we could hardly go to bed in comfort till
we had exchanged notes and discussed the day's experience.  We were
then like a couple of anglers comparing a day's kill.  But the fish
we angled for were of a metaphysical species, and we angled as
often as not in one another's baskets.  Once, in the midst of a
serious talk, each found there was a scrutinising eye upon himself;
I own I paused in embarrassment at this double detection; but
Jones, with a better civility, broke into a peal of unaffected
laughter, and declared, what was the truth, that there was a pair
of us indeed.


EARLY IMPRESSIONS


We steamed out of the Clyde on Thursday night, and early on the
Friday forenoon we took in our last batch of emigrants at Lough
Foyle, in Ireland, and said farewell to Europe.  The company was
now complete, and began to draw together, by inscrutable
magnetisms, upon the decks.  There were Scots and Irish in plenty,
a few English, a few Americans, a good handful of Scandinavians, a
German or two, and one Russian; all now belonging for ten days to
one small iron country on the deep.

As I walked the deck and looked round upon my fellow-passengers,
thus curiously assorted from all northern Europe, I began for the
first time to understand the nature of emigration.  Day by day
throughout the passage, and thenceforward across all the States,
and on to the shores of the Pacific, this knowledge grew more clear
and melancholy.  Emigration, from a word of the most cheerful
import, came to sound most dismally in my ear.  There is nothing
more agreeable to picture and nothing more pathetic to behold.  The
abstract idea, as conceived at home, is hopeful and adventurous.  A
young man, you fancy, scorning restraints and helpers, issues forth
into life, that great battle, to fight for his own hand.  The most
pleasant stories of ambition, of difficulties overcome, and of
ultimate success, are but as episodes to this great epic of self-
help.  The epic is composed of individual heroisms; it stands to
them as the victorious war which subdued an empire stands to the
personal act of bravery which spiked a single cannon and was
adequately rewarded with a medal.  For in emigration the young men
enter direct and by the shipload on their heritage of work; empty
continents swarm, as at the bo's'un's whistle, with industrious
hands, and whole new empires are domesticated to the service of
man.

This is the closet picture, and is found, on trial, to consist
mostly of embellishments.  The more I saw of my fellow-passengers,
the less I was tempted to the lyric note.  Comparatively few of the
men were below thirty; many were married, and encumbered with
families; not a few were already up in years; and this itself was
out of tune with my imaginations, for the ideal emigrant should
certainly be young.  Again, I thought he should offer to the eye
some bold type of humanity, with bluff or hawk-like features, and
the stamp of an eager and pushing disposition.  Now those around me
were for the most part quiet, orderly, obedient citizens, family
men broken by adversity, elderly youths who had failed to place
themselves in life, and people who had seen better days.  Mildness
was the prevailing character; mild mirth and mild endurance.  In a
word, I was not taking part in an impetuous and conquering sally,
such as swept over Mexico or Siberia, but found myself, like
Marmion, 'in the lost battle, borne down by the flying.'

Labouring mankind had in the last years, and throughout Great
Britain, sustained a prolonged and crushing series of defeats.  I
had heard vaguely of these reverses; of whole streets of houses
standing deserted by the Tyne, the cellar-doors broken and removed
for firewood; of homeless men loitering at the street-corners of
Glasgow with their chests beside them; of closed factories, useless
strikes, and starving girls.  But I had never taken them home to me
or represented these distresses livingly to my imagination.

A turn of the market may be a calamity as disastrous as the French
retreat from Moscow; but it hardly lends itself to lively
treatment, and makes a trifling figure in the morning papers.  We
may struggle as we please, we are not born economists.  The
individual is more affecting than the mass.  It is by the scenic
accidents, and the appeal to the carnal eye, that for the most part
we grasp the significance of tragedies.  Thus it was only now, when
I found myself involved in the rout, that I began to appreciate how
sharp had been the battle.  We were a company of the rejected; the
drunken, the incompetent, the weak, the prodigal, all who had been
unable to prevail against circumstances in the one land, were now
fleeing pitifully to another; and though one or two might still
succeed, all had already failed.  We were a shipful of failures,
the broken men of England.  Yet it must not be supposed that these
people exhibited depression.  The scene, on the contrary, was
cheerful.  Not a tear was shed on board the vessel.  All were full
of hope for the future, and showed an inclination to innocent
gaiety.  Some were heard to sing, and all began to scrape
acquaintance with small jests and ready laughter.

The children found each other out like dogs, and ran about the
decks scraping acquaintance after their fashion also.  'What do you
call your mither?' I heard one ask.  'Mawmaw,' was the reply,
indicating, I fancy, a shade of difference in the social scale.
When people pass each other on the high seas of life at so early an
age, the contact is but slight, and the relation more like what we
may imagine to be the friendship of flies than that of men; it is
so quickly joined, so easily dissolved, so open in its
communications and so devoid of deeper human qualities.  The
children, I observed, were all in a band, and as thick as thieves
at a fair, while their elders were still ceremoniously manoeuvring
on the outskirts of acquaintance.  The sea, the ship, and the
seamen were soon as familiar as home to these half-conscious little
ones.  It was odd to hear them, throughout the voyage, employ shore
words to designate portions of the vessel.  'Go 'way doon to yon
dyke,' I heard one say, probably meaning the bulwark.  I often had
my heart in my mouth, watching them climb into the shrouds or on
the rails, while the ship went swinging through the waves; and I
admired and envied the courage of their mothers, who sat by in the
sun and looked on with composure at these perilous feats.  'He'll
maybe be a sailor,' I heard one remark; 'now's the time to learn.'
I had been on the point of running forward to interfere, but stood
back at that, reproved.  Very few in the more delicate classes have
the nerve to look upon the peril of one dear to them; but the life
of poorer folk, where necessity is so much more immediate and
imperious, braces even a mother to this extreme of endurance.  And
perhaps, after all, it is better that the lad should break his neck
than that you should break his spirit.

And since I am here on the chapter of the children, I must mention
one little fellow, whose family belonged to Steerage No. 4 and 5,
and who, wherever he went, was like a strain of music round the
ship.  He was an ugly, merry, unbreeched child of three, his lint-
white hair in a tangle, his face smeared with suet and treacle; but
he ran to and fro with so natural a step, and fell and picked
himself up again with such grace and good-humour, that he might
fairly be called beautiful when he was in motion.  To meet him,
crowing with laughter and beating an accompaniment to his own mirth
with a tin spoon upon a tin cup, was to meet a little triumph of
the human species.  Even when his mother and the rest of his family
lay sick and prostrate around him, he sat upright in their midst
and sang aloud in the pleasant heartlessness of infancy.

Throughout the Friday, intimacy among us men made but a few
advances.  We discussed the probable duration of the voyage, we
exchanged pieces of information, naming our trades, what we hoped
to find in the new world, or what we were fleeing from in the old;
and, above all, we condoled together over the food and the vileness
of the steerage.  One or two had been so near famine that you may
say they had run into the ship with the devil at their heels; and
to these all seemed for the best in the best of possible steamers.
But the majority were hugely contented.  Coming as they did from a
country in so low a state as Great Britain, many of them from
Glasgow, which commercially speaking was as good as dead, and many
having long been out of work, I was surprised to find them so
dainty in their notions.  I myself lived almost exclusively on
bread, porridge, and soup, precisely as it was supplied to them,
and found it, if not luxurious, at least sufficient.  But these
working men were loud in their outcries.  It was not 'food for
human beings,' it was 'only fit for pigs,' it was 'a disgrace.'
Many of them lived almost entirely upon biscuit, others on their
own private supplies, and some paid extra for better rations from
the ship.  This marvellously changed my notion of the degree of
luxury habitual to the artisan.  I was prepared to hear him
grumble, for grumbling is the traveller's pastime; but I was not
prepared to find him turn away from a diet which was palatable to
myself.  Words I should have disregarded, or taken with a liberal
allowance; but when a man prefers dry biscuit there can be no
question of the sincerity of his disgust.

With one of their complaints I could most heartily sympathise.  A
single night of the steerage had filled them with horror.  I had
myself suffered, even in my decent-second-cabin berth, from the
lack of air; and as the night promised to be fine and quiet, I
determined to sleep on deck, and advised all who complained of
their quarters to follow my example.  I dare say a dozen of others
agreed to do so, and I thought we should have been quite a party.
Yet, when I brought up my rug about seven bells, there was no one
to be seen but the watch.  That chimerical terror of good night-
air, which makes men close their windows, list their doors, and
seal themselves up with their own poisonous exhalations, had sent
all these healthy workmen down below.  One would think we had been
brought up in a fever country; yet in England the most malarious
districts are in the bedchambers.

I felt saddened at this defection, and yet half-pleased to have the
night so quietly to myself.  The wind had hauled a little ahead on
the starboard bow, and was dry but chilly.  I found a shelter near
the fire-hole, and made myself snug for the night.

The ship moved over the uneven sea with a gentle and cradling
movement.  The ponderous, organic labours of the engine in her
bowels occupied the mind, and prepared it for slumber.  From time
to time a heavier lurch would disturb me as I lay, and recall me to
the obscure borders of consciousness; or I heard, as it were
through a veil, the clear note of the clapper on the brass and the
beautiful sea-cry, 'All's well!'  I know nothing, whether for
poetry or music, that can surpass the effect of these two syllables
in the darkness of a night at sea.

The day dawned fairly enough, and during the early part we had some
pleasant hours to improve acquaintance in the open air; but towards
nightfall the wind freshened, the rain began to fall, and the sea
rose so high that it was difficult to keep ones footing on the
deck.  I have spoken of our concerts.  We were indeed a musical
ship's company, and cheered our way into exile with the fiddle, the
accordion, and the songs of all nations.  Good, bad, or
indifferent--Scottish, English, Irish, Russian, German or Norse,--
the songs were received with generous applause.  Once or twice, a
recitation, very spiritedly rendered in a powerful Scottish accent,
varied the proceedings; and once we sought in vain to dance a
quadrille, eight men of us together, to the music of the violin.
The performers were all humorous, frisky fellows, who loved to cut
capers in private life; but as soon as they were arranged for the
dance, they conducted themselves like so many mutes at a funeral.
I have never seen decorum pushed so far; and as this was not
expected, the quadrille was soon whistled down, and the dancers
departed under a cloud.  Eight Frenchmen, even eight Englishmen
from another rank of society, would have dared to make some fun for
themselves and the spectators; but the working man, when sober,
takes an extreme and even melancholy view of personal deportment.
A fifth-form schoolboy is not more careful of dignity.  He dares
not be comical; his fun must escape from him unprepared, and above
all, it must be unaccompanied by any physical demonstration.  I
like his society under most circumstances, but let me never again
join with him in public gambols.

But the impulse to sing was strong, and triumphed over modesty and
even the inclemencies of sea and sky.  On this rough Saturday
night, we got together by the main deck-house, in a place sheltered
from the wind and rain.  Some clinging to a ladder which led to the
hurricane deck, and the rest knitting arms or taking hands, we made
a ring to support the women in the violent lurching of the ship;
and when we were thus disposed, sang to our hearts' content.  Some
of the songs were appropriate to the scene; others strikingly the
reverse.  Bastard doggrel of the music-hall, such as, 'Around her
splendid form, I weaved the magic circle,' sounded bald, bleak, and
pitifully silly.  'We don't want to fight, but, by Jingo, if we
do,' was in some measure saved by the vigour and unanimity with
which the chorus was thrown forth into the night.  I observed a
Platt-Deutsch mason, entirely innocent of English, adding heartily
to the general effect.  And perhaps the German mason is but a fair
example of the sincerity with which the song was rendered; for
nearly all with whom I conversed upon the subject were bitterly
opposed to war, and attributed their own misfortunes, and
frequently their own taste for whisky, to the campaigns in Zululand
and Afghanistan.

Every now and again, however, some song that touched the pathos of
our situation was given forth; and you could hear by the voices
that took up the burden how the sentiment came home to each, 'The
Anchor's Weighed' was true for us.  We were indeed 'Rocked on the
bosom of the stormy deep.'  How many of us could say with the
singer, 'I'm lonely to-night, love, without you,' or, 'Go, some
one, and tell them from me, to write me a letter from home'!  And
when was there a more appropriate moment for 'Auld Lang Syne' than
now, when the land, the friends, and the affections of that mingled
but beloved time were fading and fleeing behind us in the vessel's
wake?  It pointed forward to the hour when these labours should be
overpast, to the return voyage, and to many a meeting in the sanded
inn, when those who had parted in the spring of youth should again
drink a cup of kindness in their age.  Had not Burns contemplated
emigration, I scarce believe he would have found that note.

All Sunday the weather remained wild and cloudy; many were
prostrated by sickness; only five sat down to tea in the second
cabin, and two of these departed abruptly ere the meal was at an
end.  The Sabbath was observed strictly by the majority of the
emigrants.  I heard an old woman express her surprise that 'the
ship didna gae doon,' as she saw some one pass her with a chess-
board on the holy day.  Some sang Scottish psalms.  Many went to
service, and in true Scottish fashion came back ill pleased with
their divine.  'I didna think he was an experienced preacher,' said
one girl to me.

Is was a bleak, uncomfortable day; but at night, by six bells,
although the wind had not yet moderated, the clouds were all
wrecked and blown away behind the rim of the horizon, and the stars
came out thickly overhead.  I saw Venus burning as steadily and
sweetly across this hurly-burly of the winds and waters as ever at
home upon the summer woods.  The engine pounded, the screw tossed
out of the water with a roar, and shook the ship from end to end;
the bows battled with loud reports against the billows:  and as I
stood in the lee-scuppers and looked up to where the funnel leaned
out, over my head, vomiting smoke, and the black and monstrous top-
sails blotted, at each lurch, a different crop of stars, it seemed
as if all this trouble were a thing of small account, and that just
above the mast reigned peace unbroken and eternal.


STEERAGE SCENES


Our companion (Steerage No. 2 and 3) was a favourite resort.  Down
one flight of stairs there was a comparatively large open space,
the centre occupied by a hatchway, which made a convenient seat for
about twenty persons, while barrels, coils of rope, and the
carpenter's bench afforded perches for perhaps as many more.  The
canteen, or steerage bar, was on one side of the stair; on the
other, a no less attractive spot, the cabin of the indefatigable
interpreter.

I have seen people packed into this space like herrings in a
barrel, and many merry evenings prolonged there until five bells,
when the lights were ruthlessly extinguished and all must go to
roost.

It had been rumoured since Friday that there was a fiddler aboard,
who lay sick and unmelodious in Steerage No. 1; and on the Monday
forenoon, as I came down the companion, I was saluted by something
in Strathspey time.  A white-faced Orpheus was cheerily playing to
an audience of white-faced women.  It was as much as he could do to
play, and some of his hearers were scarce able to sit; yet they had
crawled from their bunks at the first experimental flourish, and
found better than medicine in the music.  Some of the heaviest
heads began to nod in time, and a degree of animation looked from
some of the palest eyes.  Humanly speaking, it is a more important
matter to play the fiddle, even badly, than to write huge works
upon recondite subjects.  What could Mr. Darwin have done for these
sick women?  But this fellow scraped away; and the world was
positively a better place for all who heard him.  We have yet to
understand the economical value of these mere accomplishments.  I
told the fiddler he was a happy man, carrying happiness about with
him in his fiddle-case, and he seemed alive to the fact.

'It is a privilege,' I said.  He thought a while upon the word,
turning it over in his Scots head, and then answered with
conviction, 'Yes, a privilege.'

That night I was summoned by 'Merrily danced the Quake's wife' into
the companion of Steerage No. 4 and 5.  This was, properly
speaking, but a strip across a deck-house, lit by a sickly lantern
which swung to and fro with the motion of the ship.  Through the
open slide-door we had a glimpse of a grey night sea, with patches
of phosphorescent foam flying, swift as birds, into the wake, and
the horizon rising and falling as the vessel rolled to the wind.
In the centre the companion ladder plunged down sheerly like an
open pit.  Below, on the first landing, and lighted by another
lamp, lads and lasses danced, not more than three at a time for
lack of space, in jigs and reels and hornpipes.  Above, on either
side, there was a recess railed with iron, perhaps two feet wide
and four long, which stood for orchestra and seats of honour.  In
the one balcony, five slatternly Irish lasses sat woven in a comely
group.  In the other was posted Orpheus, his body, which was
convulsively in motion, forming an odd contrast to his somnolent,
imperturbable Scots face.  His brother, a dark man with a vehement,
interested countenance, who made a god of the fiddler, sat by with
open mouth, drinking in the general admiration and throwing out
remarks to kindle it.

'That's a bonny hornpipe now,' he would say, 'it's a great
favourite with performers; they dance the sand dance to it.'  And
he expounded the sand dance.  Then suddenly, it would be a long,
'Hush!' with uplifted finger and glowing, supplicating eyes, 'he's
going to play "Auld Robin Gray" on one string!'  And throughout
this excruciating movement,--'On one string, that's on one string!'
he kept crying.  I would have given something myself that it had
been on none; but the hearers were much awed.  I called for a tune
or two, and thus introduced myself to the notice of the brother,
who directed his talk to me for some little while, keeping, I need
hardly mention, true to his topic, like the seamen to the star.
'He's grand of it,' he said confidentially.  'His master was a
music-hall man.'  Indeed the music-hall man had left his mark, for
our fiddler was ignorant of many of our best old airs; 'Logie o'
Buchan,' for instance, he only knew as a quick, jigging figure in a
set of quadrilles, and had never heard it called by name.  Perhaps,
after all, the brother was the more interesting performer of the
two.  I have spoken with him afterwards repeatedly, and found him
always the same quick, fiery bit of a man, not without brains; but
he never showed to such advantage as when he was thus squiring the
fiddler into public note.  There is nothing more becoming than a
genuine admiration; and it shares this with love, that it does not
become contemptible although misplaced.

The dancing was but feebly carried on.  The space was almost
impracticably small; and the Irish wenches combined the extreme of
bashfulness about this innocent display with a surprising impudence
and roughness of address.  Most often, either the fiddle lifted up
its voice unheeded, or only a couple of lads would be footing it
and snapping fingers on the landing.  And such was the eagerness of
the brother to display all the acquirements of his idol, and such
the sleepy indifference of the performer, that the tune would as
often as not be changed, and the hornpipe expire into a ballad
before the dancers had cut half a dozen shuffles.

In the meantime, however, the audience had been growing more and
more numerous every moment; there was hardly standing-room round
the top of the companion; and the strange instinct of the race
moved some of the newcomers to close both the doors, so that the
atmosphere grew insupportable.  It was a good place, as the saying
is, to leave.

The wind hauled ahead with a head sea.  By ten at night heavy
sprays were flying and drumming over the forecastle; the companion
of Steerage No. 1 had to be closed, and the door of communication
through the second cabin thrown open.  Either from the convenience
of the opportunity, or because we had already a number of
acquaintances in that part of the ship, Mr. Jones and I paid it a
late visit.  Steerage No. 1 is shaped like an isosceles triangle,
the sides opposite the equal angles bulging outward with the
contour of the ship.  It is lined with eight pens of sixteen bunks
apiece, four bunks below and four above on either side.  At night
the place is lit with two lanterns, one to each table.  As the
steamer beat on her way among the rough billows, the light passed
through violent phases of change, and was thrown to and fro and up
and down with startling swiftness.  You were tempted to wonder, as
you looked, how so thin a glimmer could control and disperse such
solid blackness.  When Jones and I entered we found a little
company of our acquaintances seated together at the triangular
foremost table.  A more forlorn party, in more dismal
circumstances, it would be hard to imagine.  The motion here in the
ship's nose was very violent; the uproar of the sea often
overpoweringly loud.  The yellow flicker of the lantern spun round
and round and tossed the shadows in masses.  The air was hot, but
it struck a chill from its foetor.

From all round in the dark bunks, the scarcely human noises of the
sick joined into a kind of farmyard chorus.  In the midst, these
five friends of mine were keeping up what heart they could in
company.  Singing was their refuge from discomfortable thoughts and
sensations.  One piped, in feeble tones, 'Oh why left I my hame?'
which seemed a pertinent question in the circumstances.  Another,
from the invisible horrors of a pen where he lay dog-sick upon the
upper-shelf, found courage, in a blink of his sufferings, to give
us several verses of the 'Death of Nelson'; and it was odd and
eerie to hear the chorus breathe feebly from all sorts of dark
corners, and 'this day has done his dooty' rise and fall and be
taken up again in this dim inferno, to an accompaniment of
plunging, hollow-sounding bows and the rattling spray-showers
overhead.

All seemed unfit for conversation; a certain dizziness had
interrupted the activity of their minds; and except to sing they
were tongue-tied.  There was present, however, one tall, powerful
fellow of doubtful nationality, being neither quite Scotsman nor
altogether Irish, but of surprising clearness of conviction on the
highest problems.  He had gone nearly beside himself on the Sunday,
because of a general backwardness to indorse his definition of mind
as 'a living, thinking substance which cannot be felt, heard, or
seen'--nor, I presume, although he failed to mention it, smelt.
Now he came forward in a pause with another contribution to our
culture.

'Just by way of change,' said he, 'I'll ask you a Scripture riddle.
There's profit in them too,' he added ungrammatically.

This was the riddle-

C and P
Did agree
To cut down C;
But C and P
Could not agree
Without the leave of G;
All the people cried to see
The crueltie
Of C and P.

Harsh are the words of Mercury after the songs of Apollo!  We were
a long while over the problem, shaking our heads and gloomily
wondering how a man could be such a fool; but at length he put us
out of suspense and divulged the fact that C and P stood for
Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate.

I think it must have been the riddle that settled us; but the
motion and the close air likewise hurried our departure.  We had
not been gone long, we heard next morning, ere two or even three
out of the five fell sick.  We thought it little wonder on the
whole, for the sea kept contrary all night.  I now made my bed upon
the second cabin floor, where, although I ran the risk of being
stepped upon, I had a free current of air, more or less vitiated
indeed, and running only from steerage to steerage, but at least
not stagnant; and from this couch, as well as the usual sounds of a
rough night at sea, the hateful coughing and retching of the sick
and the sobs of children, I heard a man run wild with terror
beseeching his friend for encouragement.  'The ship 's going down!'
he cried with a thrill of agony.  'The ship's going down!' he
repeated, now in a blank whisper, now with his voice rising towards
a sob; and his friend might reassure him, reason with him, joke at
him--all was in vain, and the old cry came back, 'The ship's going
down!'  There was something panicky and catching in the emotion of
his tones; and I saw in a clear flash what an involved and hideous
tragedy was a disaster to an emigrant ship.  If this whole
parishful of people came no more to land, into how many houses
would the newspaper carry woe, and what a great part of the web of
our corporate human life would be rent across for ever!

The next morning when I came on deck I found a new world indeed.
The wind was fair; the sun mounted into a cloudless heaven; through
great dark blue seas the ship cut a swath of curded foam.  The
horizon was dotted all day with companionable sails, and the sun
shone pleasantly on the long, heaving deck.

We had many fine-weather diversions to beguile the time.  There was
a single chess-board and a single pack of cards.  Sometimes as many
as twenty of us would be playing dominoes for love.  Feats of
dexterity, puzzles for the intelligence, some arithmetical, some of
the same order as the old problem of the fox and goose and cabbage,
were always welcome; and the latter, I observed, more popular as
well as more conspicuously well done than the former.  We had a
regular daily competition to guess the vessel's progress; and
twelve o'clock, when the result was published in the wheel-house,
came to be a moment of considerable interest.  But the interest was
unmixed.  Not a bet was laid upon our guesses.  From the Clyde to
Sandy Hook I never heard a wager offered or taken.  We had,
besides, romps in plenty.  Puss in the Corner, which we had
rebaptized, in more manly style, Devil and four Corners, was my own
favourite game; but there were many who preferred another, the
humour of which was to box a person's ears until he found out who
had cuffed him.

This Tuesday morning we were all delighted with the change of
weather, and in the highest possible spirits.  We got in a cluster
like bees, sitting between each other's feet under lee of the deck-
houses.  Stories and laughter went around.  The children climbed
about the shrouds.  White faces appeared for the first time, and
began to take on colour from the wind.  I was kept hard at work
making cigarettes for one amateur after another, and my less than
moderate skill was heartily admired.  Lastly, down sat the fiddler
in our midst and began to discourse his reels, and jigs, and
ballads, with now and then a voice or two to take up the air and
throw in the interest of human speech.

Through this merry and good-hearted scene there came three cabin
passengers, a gentleman and two young ladies, picking their way
with little gracious titters of indulgence, and a Lady-Bountiful
air about nothing, which galled me to the quick.  I have little of
the radical in social questions, and have always nourished an idea
that one person was as good as another.  But I began to be troubled
by this episode.  It was astonishing what insults these people
managed to convey by their presence.  They seemed to throw their
clothes in our faces.  Their eyes searched us all over for tatters
and incongruities.  A laugh was ready at their lips; but they were
too well-mannered to indulge it in our hearing.  Wait a bit, till
they were all back in the saloon, and then hear how wittily they
would depict the manners of the steerage.  We were in truth very
innocently, cheerfully, and sensibly engaged, and there was no
shadow of excuse for the swaying elegant superiority with which
these damsels passed among us, or for the stiff and waggish glances
of their squire.  Not a word was said; only when they were gone
Mackay sullenly damned their impudence under his breath; but we
were all conscious of an icy influence and a dead break in the
course of our enjoyment.


STEERAGE TYPES


We had a fellow on board, an Irish-American, for all the world like
a beggar in a print by Callot; one-eyed, with great, splay crow's-
feet round the sockets; a knotty squab nose coming down over his
moustache; a miraculous hat; a shirt that had been white, ay, ages
long ago; an alpaca coat in its last sleeves; and, without
hyperbole, no buttons to his trousers.  Even in these rags and
tatters, the man twinkled all over with impudence like a piece of
sham jewellery; and I have heard him offer a situation to one of
his fellow-passengers with the air of a lord.  Nothing could
overlie such a fellow; a kind of base success was written on his
brow.  He was then in his ill days; but I can imagine him in
Congress with his mouth full of bombast and sawder.  As we moved in
the same circle, I was brought necessarily into his society.  I do
not think I ever heard him say anything that was true, kind, or
interesting; but there was entertainment in the man's demeanour.
You might call him a half-educated Irish Tigg.

Our Russian made a remarkable contrast to this impossible fellow.
Rumours and legends were current in the steerages about his
antecedents.  Some said he was a Nihilist escaping; others set him
down for a harmless spendthrift, who had squandered fifty thousand
roubles, and whose father had now despatched him to America by way
of penance.  Either tale might flourish in security; there was no
contradiction to be feared, for the hero spoke not one word of
English.  I got on with him lumberingly enough in broken German,
and learned from his own lips that he had been an apothecary.  He
carried the photograph of his betrothed in a pocket-book, and
remarked that it did not do her justice.  The cut of his head stood
out from among the passengers with an air of startling strangeness.
The first natural instinct was to take him for a desperado; but
although the features, to our Western eyes, had a barbaric and
unhomely cast, the eye both reassured and touched.  It was large
and very dark and soft, with an expression of dumb endurance, as if
it had often looked on desperate circumstances and never looked on
them without resolution.

He cried out when I used the word. 'No, no,' he said, 'not
resolution.'

'The resolution to endure,' I explained.

And then he shrugged his shoulders, and said, 'Ach, ja,' with
gusto, like a man who has been flattered in his favourite
pretensions.  Indeed, he was always hinting at some secret sorrow;
and his life, he said, had been one of unusual trouble and anxiety;
so the legends of the steerage may have represented at least some
shadow of the truth.  Once, and once only, he sang a song at our
concerts; standing forth without embarrassment, his great stature
somewhat humped, his long arms frequently extended, his Kalmuck
head thrown backward.  It was a suitable piece of music, as deep as
a cow's bellow and wild like the White Sea.  He was struck and
charmed by the freedom and sociality of our manners.  At home, he
said, no one on a journey would speak to him, but those with whom
he would not care to speak; thus unconsciously involving himself in
the condemnation of his countrymen.  But Russia was soon to be
changed; the ice of the Neva was softening under the sun of
civilisation; the new ideas, 'wie eine feine Violine,' were audible
among the big empty drum notes of Imperial diplomacy; and he looked
to see a great revival, though with a somewhat indistinct and
childish hope.

We had a father and son who made a pair of Jacks-of-all-trades.  It
was the son who sang the 'Death of Nelson' under such contrarious
circumstances.  He was by trade a shearer of ship plates; but he
could touch the organ, and led two choirs, and played the flute and
piccolo in a professional string band.  His repertory of songs was,
besides, inexhaustible, and ranged impartially from the very best
to the very worst within his reach.  Nor did he seem to make the
least distinction between these extremes, but would cheerily follow
up 'Tom Bowling' with 'Around her splendid form.'

The father, an old, cheery, small piece of man-hood, could do
everything connected with tinwork from one end of the process to
the other, use almost every carpenter's tool, and make picture
frames to boot.  'I sat down with silver plate every Sunday,' said
he, 'and pictures on the wall.  I have made enough money to be
rolling in my carriage.  But, sir,' looking at me unsteadily with
his bright rheumy eyes, 'I was troubled with a drunken wife.'  He
took a hostile view of matrimony in consequence.  'It's an old
saying,' he remarked:  'God made 'em, and the devil he mixed 'em.'

I think he was justified by his experience.  It was a dreary story.
He would bring home three pounds on Saturday, and on Monday all the
clothes would be in pawn.  Sick of the useless struggle, he gave up
a paying contract, and contented himself with small and ill-paid
jobs.  'A bad job was as good as a good job for me,' he said; 'it
all went the same way.'  Once the wife showed signs of amendment;
she kept steady for weeks on end; it was again worth while to
labour and to do one's best.  The husband found a good situation
some distance from home, and, to make a little upon every hand,
started the wife in a cook-shop; the children were here and there,
busy as mice; savings began to grow together in the bank, and the
golden age of hope had returned again to that unhappy family.  But
one week my old acquaintance, getting earlier through with his
work, came home on the Friday instead of the Saturday, and there
was his wife to receive him reeling drunk.  He 'took and gave her a
pair o' black eyes,' for which I pardon him, nailed up the cook-
shop door, gave up his situation, and resigned himself to a life of
poverty, with the workhouse at the end.  As the children came to
their full age they fled the house, and established themselves in
other countries; some did well, some not so well; but the father
remained at home alone with his drunken wife, all his sound-hearted
pluck and varied accomplishments depressed and negatived.