Essays of Travel E-Book

Robert Louis Stevenson

• Herausgeber: Seltzer Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 351

Beschreibung

This collection includes: THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT: FROM THE CLYDE TO SANDY HOOK.
COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK, AN AUTUMN EFFECT, A WINTER'S WALK IN CARRICK AND GALLOWAY, FOREST NOTES, 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, and ON THE ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES.

Leseprobe

ESSAYS OF TRAVEL BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

published by Samizdat Express, Orange, CT, USA

established in 1974, offering over 14,000 books

Books by Robert Louis Stevenson:

Across the Plains

The Art of Writing

Ballads

Black Arrow

The Bottle Imp

Catriona or David Balfour (sequel to Kidnapped)

A Child's Garden of Verses

The Ebb-Tide

Edinburgh

Essays

Essays of Travel

Fables

Familiar Studies of Men and Books

Father Damien

Footnote to History

In the South Seas

An Inland Voyage

Island Nights' Entertainments

Kidnapped

Lay Morals

Letters

Lodging for the Night

Markheim

Master of Ballantrae

Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin

Memories and Portraits

Merry Men

Moral Emblems

New Arabian Nights

New Poems

The Pavilion on the Links

Four Plays

The Pocket R. L. S.

Prayers Written at Vailima

Prince Otto

Records of a Family of Engineers

The Sea Fogs

The Silverado Squatters

Songs of Travel

St. Ives

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Tales and Fantasies

Thrawn Janet

Travels with a Donkey

Treasure Island

Underwoods

Vailima Letters

Virginibus Puerisque

The Waif Woman

Weir of Hermiston

The Wrecker

The Wrong Box

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I.    THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT:  FROM THE CLYDE TO SANDY HOOK

         THE SECOND CABIN

         EARLY IMPRESSION

         STEERAGE IMPRESSIONS

         STEERAGE TYPES

         THE SICK MAN

         THE STOWAWAYS

         PERSONAL EXPIERENCE AND REVIEW

         NEW YORK

II.   COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK

         COCKERMOUTH

         AN EVANGELIST

         ANOTHER

         LAST OF SMETHURST

III.  AN AUTUMN EFFECT

IV.   A WINTER'S WALK IN CARRICK AND GALLOWAY

V.    FOREST NOTES -

         ON THE PLAINS

         IN THE SEASON

         IDLE HOURS

         A PLEASURE-PARTY

         THE WOODS IN SPRING

         MORALITY

VI.   A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE

VII.  RANDOM MEMORIES:  ROSA QUO LOCORUM

VIII. THE IDEAL HOUSE

IX.   DAVOS IN WINTER

X.    HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS

XI.   ALPINE DIVERSION

XII.  THE STUMULATION OF THE ALPS

XIII. ROADS

XIV.  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.