When we arrived at Queenstown, the captain announced to us that, as the ship would wait there six hours, we might go ashore and see something of our Irish friends.  So we chartered several jaunting-cars, after much tribulation and delay in arranging terms with the drivers thereof, and started off on a merry exploring expedition.  I remember there was a good deal of racing up and down the hills of Queenstown, much shouting and laughing, and crowds of beggars howling after us for pence and beer.  The Irish jaunting-car is a peculiar institution, and we all sat with our legs dangling over the road in a “dim and perilous way.”  Occasionally a horse would give out, for the animals were sad specimens, poorly fed and wofully driven.  We were almost devoured by the ragamuffins that ran beside our wheels, and I remember the “sad civility” with which Hawthorne regarded their clamors.  We had provided ourselves before starting with much small coin, which, however, gave out during our first mile.  Hawthorne attempted to explain our inability further to supply their demands, having, as he said to them, nothing less than a sovereign in his pocket, when a voice from the crowd shouted, “Bedad, your honor, I can change that for ye”; and the knave actually did it on the spot.

Hawthorne’s love for the sea amounted to a passionate worship; and while I (the worst sailor probably on this planet) was longing, spite of the good company on board, to reach land as soon as possible, Hawthorne was constantly saying in his quiet, earnest way, “I should like to sail on and on forever, and never touch the shore again.”  He liked to stand alone in the bows of the ship and see the sun go down, and he was never tired of walking the deck at midnight.  I used to watch his dark, solitary figure under the stars, pacing up and down some unfrequented part of the vessel, musing and half melancholy.  Sometimes he would lie down beside me and commiserate my unquiet condition.  Seasickness, he declared, he could not understand, and was constantly recommending most extraordinary dishes and drinks, “all made out of the artist’s brain,” which he said were sovereign remedies for nautical illness.  I remember to this day some of the preparations which, in his revelry of fancy, he would advise me to take, a farrago of good things almost rivalling “Oberon’s Feast,” spread out so daintily in Herrick’s “Hesperides.”  He thought, at first, if I could bear a few roc’s eggs beaten up by a mermaid on a dolphin’s back, I might be benefited.  He decided that a gruel made from a sheaf of Robin Hood’s arrows would be strengthening.  When suffering pain, “a right gude willie-waught,” or a stiff cup of hemlock of the Socrates brand, before retiring, he considered very good.  He said he had heard recommended a dose of salts distilled from the tears of Niobe, but he didn’t approve of that remedy.  He observed that he had a high opinion of hearty food, such as potted owl with Minerva sauce,