It was an appropriate relief when the gong sounded
for prayer meeting. The first Saturday night
of any other pleasure excursion might have been devoted
to whist and dancing; but I submit it to the unprejudiced
mind if it would have been in good taste for us to
engage in such frivolities, considering what we had
gone through and the frame of mind we were in.
We would have shone at a wake, but not at anything
more festive.
However, there is always a cheering influence about
the sea; and in my berth that night, rocked by the
measured swell of the waves and lulled by the murmur
of the distant surf, I soon passed tranquilly out of
all consciousness of the dreary experiences of the
day and damaging premonitions of the future.
All day Sunday at anchor. The storm had gone
down a great deal, but the sea had not. It was
still piling its frothy hills high in air “outside,”
as we could plainly see with the glasses. We
could not properly begin a pleasure excursion on Sunday;
we could not offer untried stomachs to so pitiless
a sea as that. We must lie still till Monday.
And we did. But we had repetitions of church
and prayer-meetings; and so, of course, we were just
as eligibly situated as we could have been any where.
I was up early that Sabbath morning and was early
to breakfast. I felt a perfectly natural desire
to have a good, long, unprejudiced look at the passengers
at a time when they should be free from self-consciousness
—which is at breakfast, when such a moment
occurs in the lives of human beings at all.
I was greatly surprised to see so many elderly people—I
might almost say, so many venerable people.
A glance at the long lines of heads was apt to make
one think it was all gray. But it was not.
There was a tolerably fair sprinkling of young folks,
and another fair sprinkling of gentlemen and ladies
who were non-committal as to age, being neither actually
old or absolutely young.
The next morning we weighed anchor and went to sea.
It was a great happiness to get away after this dragging,
dispiriting delay. I thought there never was
such gladness in the air before, such brightness in
the sun, such beauty in the sea. I was satisfied
with the picnic then and with all its belongings.
All my malicious instincts were dead within me; and
as America faded out of sight, I think a spirit of
charity rose up in their place that was as boundless,
for the time being, as the broad ocean that was heaving
its billows about us. I wished to express my
feelings —I wished to lift up my voice
and sing; but I did not know anything to sing, and
so I was obliged to give up the idea. It was
no loss to the ship, though, perhaps.
It was breezy and pleasant, but the sea was still
very rough. One could not promenade without
risking his neck; at one moment the bowsprit was taking
a deadly aim at the sun in midheaven, and at the next
it was trying to harpoon a shark in the bottom of
the ocean. What a weird sensation it is to feel
the stem of a ship sinking swiftly from under you
and see the bow climbing high away among the clouds!
One’s safest course that day was to clasp a
railing and hang on; walking was too precarious a
pastime.
