cabin lamps.  If these things were presumed, the presumption was at fault.  The venerable excursionists were not gay and frisky.  They played no blind-man’s buff; they dealt not in whist; they shirked not the irksome journal, for alas! most of them were even writing books.  They never romped, they talked but little, they never sang, save in the nightly prayer-meeting.  The pleasure ship was a synagogue, and the pleasure trip was a funeral excursion without a corpse. (There is nothing exhilarating about a funeral excursion without a corpse.) A free, hearty laugh was a sound that was not heard oftener than once in seven days about those decks or in those cabins, and when it was heard it met with precious little sympathy.  The excursionists danced, on three separate evenings, long, long ago, (it seems an age.) quadrilles, of a single set, made up of three ladies and five gentlemen, (the latter with handkerchiefs around their arms to signify their sex.) who timed their feet to the solemn wheezing of a melodeon; but even this melancholy orgie was voted to be sinful, and dancing was discontinued.

     The pilgrims played dominoes when too much Josephus or Robinson’s
     Holy Land Researches, or book-writing, made recreation necessary
—­ for dominoes is about as mild and sinless a game as any in the
     world, perhaps, excepting always the ineffably insipid diversion
     they call croquet, which is a game where you don’t pocket any balls
     and don’t carom on any thing of any consequence, and when you are
     done nobody has to pay, and there are no refreshments to saw off,
     and, consequently, there isn’t any satisfaction whatever about it
—­ they played dominoes till they were rested, and then they
     blackguarded each other privately till prayer-time.  When they were
     not seasick they were uncommonly prompt when the dinner-gong
     sounded.  Such was our daily life on board the ship—­solemnity,
     decorum, dinner, dominoes, devotions, slander.  It was not lively
     enough for a pleasure trip; but if we had only had a corpse it would
     have made a noble funeral excursion.  It is all over now; but when I
     look back, the idea of these venerable fossils skipping forth on a
     six months’ picnic, seems exquisitely refreshing.  The advertised
     title of the expedition—­“The Grand Holy Land Pleasure Excursion”
—­ was a misnomer.  “The Grand Holy Land Funeral Procession” would have
     been better—­much better.

Wherever we went, in Europe, Asia, or Africa, we made a sensation, and, I suppose I may add, created a famine.  None of us had ever been any where before; we all hailed from the interior; travel was a wild novelty to us, and we conducted ourselves in accordance with the natural instincts that were in us, and trammeled ourselves with no ceremonies, no conventionalities.  We always took care to make it understood that