capable of love, anger, and devotion. She had
a look, too, of refinement, like one who might have
been a better lady than most, had she been allowed
the opportunity. When alone she seemed preoccupied
and sad; but she was not often alone; there was usually
by her side a heavy, dull, gross man in rough clothes,
chary of speech and gesture—not from caution,
but poverty of disposition; a man like a ditcher,
unlovely and uninteresting; whom she petted and tended
and waited on with her eyes as if he had been Amadis
of Gaul. It was strange to see this hulking
fellow dog-sick, and this delicate, sad woman caring
for him. He seemed, from first to last, insensible
of her caresses and attentions, and she seemed unconscious
of his insensibility. The Irish husband, who
sang his wife to sleep, and this Scottish girl serving
her Orson, were the two bits of human nature that
most appealed to me throughout the voyage.
On the Thursday before we arrived, the tickets were
collected; and soon a rumour began to go round the
vessel; and this girl, with her bit of sealskin cap,
became the centre of whispering and pointed fingers.
She also, it was said, was a stowaway of a sort; for
she was on board with neither ticket nor money; and
the man with whom she travelled was the father of
a family, who had left wife and children to be hers.
The ship’s officers discouraged the story,
which may therefore have been a story and no more;
but it was believed in the steerage, and the poor
girl had to encounter many curious eyes from that
day forth.
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND REVIEW
Travel is of two kinds; and this voyage of mine across
the ocean combined both. ‘Out of my country
and myself I go,’ sings the old poet:
and I was not only travelling out of my country in
latitude and longitude, but out of myself in diet,
associates, and consideration. Part of the interest
and a great deal of the amusement flowed, at least
to me, from this novel situation in the world.
I found that I had what they call fallen in life with
absolute success and verisimilitude. I was taken
for a steerage passenger; no one seemed surprised
that I should be so; and there was nothing but the
brass plate between decks to remind me that I had once
been a gentleman. In a former book, describing
a former journey, I expressed some wonder that I could
be readily and naturally taken for a pedlar, and explained
the accident by the difference of language and manners
between England and France. I must now take a
humbler view; for here I was among my own countrymen,
somewhat roughly clad to be sure, but with every advantage
of speech and manner; and I am bound to confess that
I passed for nearly anything you please except an
educated gentleman. The sailors called me ‘mate,’
the officers addressed me as ‘my man,’
my comrades accepted me without hesitation for a person
of their own character and experience, but with some
