Essays of Travel
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

Contents

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.

Harsh are the words of Mercury after the songs of Apollo! We were a
long while over the problem, shaking our heads and gloomily wondering
how a man could be such a fool; but at length he put us out of
suspense and divulged the fact that C and P stood for Caiaphas and
Pontius Pilate.

I think it must have been the riddle that settled us; but the motion
and the close air likewise hurried our departure. We had not been
gone long, we heard next morning, ere two or even three out of the
five fell sick. We thought it little wonder on the whole, for the
sea kept contrary all night. I now made my bed upon the second cabin
floor, where, although I ran the risk of being stepped upon, I had a
free current of air, more or less vitiated indeed, and running only
from steerage to steerage, but at least not stagnant; and from this
couch, as well as the usual sounds of a rough night at sea, the
hateful coughing and retching of the sick and the sobs of children, I
heard a man run wild with terror beseeching his friend for
encouragement. 'The ship 's going down!' he cried with a thrill of
agony. 'The ship's going down!' he repeated, now in a blank whisper,
now with his voice rising towards a sob; and his friend might
reassure him, reason with him, joke at him - all was in vain, and the
old cry came back, 'The ship's going down!'  There was something
panicky and catching in the emotion of his tones; and I saw in a
clear flash what an involved and hideous tragedy was a disaster to an
emigrant ship. If this whole parishful of people came no more to
land, into how many houses would the newspaper carry woe, and what a
great part of the web of our corporate human life would be rent
across for ever!

The next morning when I came on deck I found a new world indeed. The
wind was fair; the sun mounted into a cloudless heaven; through great
dark blue seas the ship cut a swath of curded foam. The horizon was
dotted all day with companionable sails, and the sun shone pleasantly
on the long, heaving deck.

We had many fine-weather diversions to beguile the time. There was a
single chess-board and a single pack of cards. Sometimes as many as
twenty of us would be playing dominoes for love. Feats of dexterity,
puzzles for the intelligence, some arithmetical, some of the same
order as the old problem of the fox and goose and cabbage, were
always welcome; and the latter, I observed, more popular as well as
more conspicuously well done than the former. We had a regular daily
competition to guess the vessel's progress; and twelve o'clock, when
the result was published in the wheel-house, came to be a moment of
considerable interest. But the interest was unmixed. Not a bet was
laid upon our guesses. From the Clyde to Sandy Hook I never heard a
wager offered or taken. We had, besides, romps in plenty. Puss in
the Corner, which we had rebaptized, in more manly style, Devil and
four Corners, was my own favourite game; but there were many who
preferred another, the humour of which was to box a person's ears
until he found out who had cuffed him.

This Tuesday morning we were all delighted with the change of
weather, and in the highest possible spirits. We got in a cluster
like bees, sitting between each other's feet under lee of the deck-
houses. Stories and laughter went around. The children climbed
about the shrouds. White faces appeared for the first time, and
began to take on colour from the wind. I was kept hard at work
making cigarettes for one amateur after another, and my less than
moderate skill was heartily admired. Lastly, down sat the fiddler in
our midst and began to discourse his reels, and jigs, and ballads,
with now and then a voice or two to take up the air and throw in the
interest of human speech.

Through this merry and good-hearted scene there came three cabin
passengers, a gentleman and two young ladies, picking their way with
little gracious titters of indulgence, and a Lady-Bountiful air about
nothing, which galled me to the quick. I have little of the radical
in social questions, and have always nourished an idea that one
person was as good as another. But I began to be troubled by this
episode. It was astonishing what insults these people managed to
convey by their presence. They seemed to throw their clothes in our
faces. Their eyes searched us all over for tatters and
incongruities. A laugh was ready at their lips; but they were too
well-mannered to indulge it in our hearing. Wait a bit, till they
were all back in the saloon, and then hear how wittily they would
depict the manners of the steerage. We were in truth very
innocently, cheerfully, and sensibly engaged, and there was no shadow
of excuse for the swaying elegant superiority with which these
damsels passed among us, or for the stiff and waggish glances of
their squire. Not a word was said; only when they were gone Mackay
sullenly damned their impudence under his breath; but we were all
conscious of an icy influence and a dead break in the course of our
enjoyment.

STEERAGE TYPES

We had a fellow on board, an Irish-American, for all the world like a
beggar in a print by Callot; one-eyed, with great, splay crow's-feet
round the sockets; a knotty squab nose coming down over his
moustache; a miraculous hat; a shirt that had been white, ay, ages
long ago; an alpaca coat in its last sleeves; and, without hyperbole,
no buttons to his trousers. Even in these rags and tatters, the man
twinkled all over with impudence like a piece of sham jewellery; and
I have heard him offer a situation to one of his fellow-passengers
with the air of a lord. Nothing could overlie such a fellow; a kind
of base success was written on his brow. He was then in his ill
days; but I can imagine him in Congress with his mouth full of
bombast and sawder. As we moved in the same circle, I was brought
necessarily into his society. I do not think I ever heard him say
anything that was true, kind, or interesting; but there was
entertainment in the man's demeanour. You might call him a half-
educated Irish Tigg.

Our Russian made a remarkable contrast to this impossible fellow.
Rumours and legends were current in the steerages about his
antecedents. Some said he was a Nihilist escaping; others set him
down for a harmless spendthrift, who had squandered fifty thousand
roubles, and whose father had now despatched him to America by way of
penance. Either tale might flourish in security; there was no
contradiction to be feared, for the hero spoke not one word of
English. I got on with him lumberingly enough in broken German, and
learned from his own lips that he had been an apothecary. He carried
the photograph of his betrothed in a pocket-book, and remarked that
it did not do her justice. The cut of his head stood out from among
the passengers with an air of startling strangeness. The first
natural instinct was to take him for a desperado; but although the
features, to our Western eyes, had a barbaric and unhomely cast, the
eye both reassured and touched. It was large and very dark and soft,
with an expression of dumb endurance, as if it had often looked on
desperate circumstances and never looked on them without resolution.

He cried out when I used the word. 'No, no,' he said, 'not
resolution.'

'The resolution to endure,' I explained.

And then he shrugged his shoulders, and said, 'ACH, JA,' with gusto,
like a man who has been flattered in his favourite pretensions.
Indeed, he was always hinting at some secret sorrow; and his life, he
said, had been one of unusual trouble and anxiety; so the legends of
the steerage may have represented at least some shadow of the truth.
Once, and once only, he sang a song at our concerts; standing forth
without embarrassment, his great stature somewhat humped, his long
arms frequently extended, his Kalmuck head thrown backward. It was a
suitable piece of music, as deep as a cow's bellow and wild like the
White Sea. He was struck and charmed by the freedom and sociality of
our manners. At home, he said, no one on a journey would speak to
him, but those with whom he would not care to speak; thus
unconsciously involving himself in the condemnation of his
countrymen. But Russia was soon to be changed; the ice of the Neva
was softening under the sun of civilisation; the new ideas, 'WIE EINE
FEINE VIOLINE,' were audible among the big empty drum notes of
Imperial diplomacy; and he looked to see a great revival, though with
a somewhat indistinct and childish hope.

We had a father and son who made a pair of Jacks-of-all-trades. It
was the son who sang the 'Death of Nelson' under such contrarious
circumstances. He was by trade a shearer of ship plates; but he
could touch the organ, and led two choirs, and played the flute and
piccolo in a professional string band. His repertory of songs was,
besides, inexhaustible, and ranged impartially from the very best to
the very worst within his reach. Nor did he seem to make the least
distinction between these extremes, but would cheerily follow up 'Tom
Bowling' with 'Around her splendid form.'

The father, an old, cheery, small piece of man-hood, could do
everything connected with tinwork from one end of the process to the
other, use almost every carpenter's tool, and make picture frames to
boot. 'I sat down with silver plate every Sunday,' said he, 'and
pictures on the wall. I have made enough money to be rolling in my
carriage. But, sir,' looking at me unsteadily with his bright rheumy
eyes, 'I was troubled with a drunken wife.'  He took a hostile view
of matrimony in consequence. 'It's an old saying,' he remarked:
'God made 'em, and the devil he mixed 'em.'

I think he was justified by his experience. It was a dreary story.
He would bring home three pounds on Saturday, and on Monday all the
clothes would be in pawn. Sick of the useless struggle, he gave up a
paying contract, and contented himself with small and ill-paid jobs.
'A bad job was as good as a good job for me,' he said; 'it all went
the same way.'  Once the wife showed signs of amendment; she kept
steady for weeks on end; it was again worth while to labour and to do
one's best. The husband found a good situation some distance from
home, and, to make a little upon every hand, started the wife in a
cook-shop; the children were here and there, busy as mice; savings
began to grow together in the bank, and the golden age of hope had
returned again to that unhappy family. But one week my old
acquaintance, getting earlier through with his work, came home on the
Friday instead of the Saturday, and there was his wife to receive him
reeling drunk. He 'took and gave her a pair o' black eyes,' for
which I pardon him, nailed up the cook-shop door, gave up his
situation, and resigned himself to a life of poverty, with the
workhouse at the end. As the children came to their full age they
fled the house, and established themselves in other countries; some
did well, some not so well; but the father remained at home alone
with his drunken wife, all his sound-hearted pluck and varied
accomplishments depressed and negatived.

Was she dead now? or, after all these years, had he broken the chain,
and run from home like a schoolboy? I could not discover which; but
here at least he was out on the adventure, and still one of the
bravest and most youthful men on board.

'Now, I suppose, I must put my old bones to work again,' said he;
'but I can do a turn yet.'

And the son to whom he was going, I asked, was he not able to support
him?

'Oh yes,' he replied. 'But I'm never happy without a job on hand.
And I'm stout; I can eat a'most anything. You see no craze about
me.'

This tale of a drunken wife was paralleled on board by another of a
drunken father. He was a capable man, with a good chance in life;
but he had drunk up two thriving businesses like a bottle of sherry,
and involved his sons along with him in ruin. Now they were on board
with us, fleeing his disastrous neighbourhood.

Total abstinence, like all ascetical conclusions, is unfriendly to
the most generous, cheerful, and human parts of man; but it could
have adduced many instances and arguments from among our ship's
company. I was, one day conversing with a kind and happy Scotsman,
running to fat and perspiration in the physical, but with a taste for
poetry and a genial sense of fun. I had asked him his hopes in
emigrating. They were like those of so many others, vague and
unfounded; times were bad at home; they were said to have a turn for
the better in the States; a man could get on anywhere, he thought.
That was precisely the weak point of his position; for if he could
get on in America, why could he not do the same in Scotland? But I
never had the courage to use that argument, though it was often on
the tip of my tongue, and instead I agreed with him heartily adding,
with reckless originality, 'If the man stuck to his work, and kept
away from drink.'

'Ah!' said he slowly, 'the drink! You see, that's just my trouble.'

He spoke with a simplicity that was touching, looking at me at the
same time with something strange and timid in his eye, half-ashamed,
half-sorry, like a good child who knows he should be beaten. You
would have said he recognised a destiny to which he was born, and
accepted the consequences mildly. Like the merchant Abudah, he was
at the same time fleeing from his destiny and carrying it along with
him, the whole at an expense of six guineas.

As far as I saw, drink, idleness, and incompetency were the three
great causes of emigration, and for all of them, and drink first and
foremost, this trick of getting transported overseas appears to me
the silliest means of cure. You cannot run away from a weakness; you
must some time fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why not
now, and where you stand? COELUM NON ANIMAM. Change Glenlivet for
Bourbon, and it is still whisky, only not so good. A sea-voyage will
not give a man the nerve to put aside cheap pleasure; emigration has
to be done before we climb the vessel; an aim in life is the only
fortune worth the finding; and it is not to be found in foreign
lands, but in the heart itself.

Speaking generally, there is no vice of this kind more contemptible
than another; for each is but a result and outward sign of a soul
tragically ship-wrecked. In the majority of cases, cheap pleasure is
resorted to by way of anodyne. The pleasure-seeker sets forth upon
life with high and difficult ambitions; he meant to be nobly good and
nobly happy, though at as little pains as possible to himself; and it
is because all has failed in his celestial enterprise that you now
behold him rolling in the garbage. Hence the comparative success of
the teetotal pledge; because to a man who had nothing it sets at
least a negative aim in life. Somewhat as prisoners beguile their
days by taming a spider, the reformed drunkard makes an interest out
of abstaining from intoxicating drinks, and may live for that
negation. There is something, at least, NOT TO BE DONE each day; and
a cold triumph awaits him every evening.

We had one on board with us, whom I have already referred to under
the name Mackay, who seemed to me not only a good instance of this
failure in life of which we have been speaking, but a good type of
the intelligence which here surrounded me. Physically he was a small
Scotsman, standing a little back as though he were already carrying
the elements of a corporation, and his looks somewhat marred by the
smallness of his eyes. Mentally, he was endowed above the average.
There were but few subjects on which he could not converse with
understanding and a dash of wit; delivering himself slowly and with
gusto like a man who enjoyed his own sententiousness. He was a dry,
quick, pertinent debater, speaking with a small voice, and swinging
on his heels to launch and emphasise an argument. When he began a
discussion, he could not bear to leave it off, but would pick the
subject to the bone, without once relinquishing a point. An engineer
by trade, Mackay believed in the unlimited perfectibility of all
machines except the human machine. The latter he gave up with
ridicule for a compound of carrion and perverse gases. He had an
appetite for disconnected facts which I can only compare to the
savage taste for beads. What is called information was indeed a
passion with the man, and he not only delighted to receive it, but
could pay you back in kind.

With all these capabilities, here was Mackay, already no longer
young, on his way to a new country, with no prospects, no money, and
but little hope. He was almost tedious in the cynical disclosures of
his despair. 'The ship may go down for me,' he would say, 'now or
to-morrow. I have nothing to lose and nothing to hope.'  And again:
'I am sick of the whole damned performance.'  He was, like the kind
little man, already quoted, another so-called victim of the bottle.
But Mackay was miles from publishing his weakness to the world; laid
the blame of his failure on corrupt masters and a corrupt State
policy; and after he had been one night overtaken and had played the
buffoon in his cups, sternly, though not without tact, suppressed all
reference to his escapade. It was a treat to see him manage this:
the various jesters withered under his gaze, and you were forced to
recognise in him a certain steely force, and a gift of command which
might have ruled a senate.

In truth it was not whisky that had ruined him; he was ruined long
before for all good human purposes but conversation. His eyes were
sealed by a cheap, school-book materialism. He could see nothing in
the world but money and steam-engines. He did not know what you
meant by the word happiness. He had forgotten the simple emotions of
childhood, and perhaps never encountered the delights of youth. He
believed in production, that useful figment of economy, as if it had
been real like laughter; and production, without prejudice to liquor,
was his god and guide. One day he took me to task - novel cry to me
- upon the over-payment of literature. Literary men, he said, were
more highly paid than artisans; yet the artisan made threshing-
machines and butter-churns, and the man of letters, except in the way
of a few useful handbooks, made nothing worth the while. He produced
a mere fancy article. Mackay's notion of a book was HOPPUS'S
MEASURER. Now in my time I have possessed and even studied that
work; but if I were to be left to-morrow on Juan Fernandez, Hoppus's
is not the book that I should choose for my companion volume.

I tried to fight the point with Mackay. I made him own that he had
taken pleasure in reading books otherwise, to his view,
insignificant; but he was too wary to advance a step beyond the
admission. It was in vain for me to argue that here was pleasure
ready-made and running from the spring, whereas his ploughs and
butter-churns were but means and mechanisms to give men the necessary
food and leisure before they start upon the search for pleasure; he
jibbed and ran away from such conclusions. The thing was different,
he declared, and nothing was serviceable but what had to do with
food. 'Eat, eat, eat!' he cried; 'that's the bottom and the top.'  
By an odd irony of circumstance, he grew so much interested in this
discussion that he let the hour slip by unnoticed and had to go
without his tea. He had enough sense and humour, indeed he had no
lack of either, to have chuckled over this himself in private; and
even to me he referred to it with the shadow of a smile.

Mackay was a hot bigot. He would not hear of religion. I have seen
him waste hours of time in argument with all sorts of poor human
creatures who understood neither him nor themselves, and he had had
the boyishness to dissect and criticise even so small a matter as the
riddler's definition of mind. He snorted aloud with zealotry and the
lust for intellectual battle. Anything, whatever it was, that seemed
to him likely to discourage the continued passionate production of
corn and steam-engines he resented like a conspiracy against the
people. Thus, when I put in the plea for literature, that it was
only in good books, or in the society of the good, that a man could
get help in his conduct, he declared I was in a different world from
him. 'Damn my conduct!' said he. 'I have given it up for a bad job.
My question is, "Can I drive a nail?"' And he plainly looked upon me
as one who was insidiously seeking to reduce the people's annual
bellyful of corn and steam-engines.

It may be argued that these opinions spring from the defect of
culture; that a narrow and pinching way of life not only exaggerates
to a man the importance of material conditions, but indirectly, by
denying him the necessary books and leisure, keeps his mind ignorant
of larger thoughts; and that hence springs this overwhelming concern
about diet, and hence the bald view of existence professed by Mackay.
Had this been an English peasant the conclusion would be tenable.
But Mackay had most of the elements of a liberal education. He had
skirted metaphysical and mathematical studies. He had a thoughtful
hold of what he knew, which would be exceptional among bankers. He
had been brought up in the midst of hot-house piety, and told, with
incongruous pride, the story of his own brother's deathbed ecstasies.
Yet he had somehow failed to fulfil himself, and was adrift like a
dead thing among external circumstances, without hope or lively
preference or shaping aim. And further, there seemed a tendency
among many of his fellows to fall into the same blank and unlovely
opinions. One thing, indeed, is not to be learned in Scotland, and
that is the way to be happy. Yet that is the whole of culture, and
perhaps two-thirds of morality. Can it be that the Puritan school,
by divorcing a man from nature, by thinning out his instincts, and
setting a stamp of its disapproval on whole fields of human activity
and interest, leads at last directly to material greed?

Nature is a good guide through life, and the love of simple pleasures
next, if not superior, to virtue; and we had on board an Irishman who
based his claim to the widest and most affectionate popularity
precisely upon these two qualities, that he was natural and happy.
He boasted a fresh colour, a tight little figure, unquenchable
gaiety, and indefatigable goodwill. His clothes puzzled the
diagnostic mind, until you heard he had been once a private coachman,
when they became eloquent and seemed a part of his biography. His
face contained the rest, and, I fear, a prophecy of the future; the
hawk's nose above accorded so ill with the pink baby's mouth below.
His spirit and his pride belonged, you might say, to the nose; while
it was the general shiftlessness expressed by the other that had
thrown him from situation to situation, and at length on board the
emigrant ship. Barney ate, so to speak, nothing from the galley; his
own tea, butter, and eggs supported him throughout the voyage; and
about mealtime you might often find him up to the elbows in amateur
cookery. His was the first voice heard singing among all the
passengers; he was the first who fell to dancing. From Loch Foyle to
Sandy Hook, there was not a piece of fun undertaken but there was
Barney in the midst.

You ought to have seen him when he stood up to sing at our concerts -
his tight little figure stepping to and fro, and his feet shuffling
to the air, his eyes seeking and bestowing encouragement - and to
have enjoyed the bow, so nicely calculated between jest and earnest,
between grace and clumsiness, with which he brought each song to a
conclusion. He was not only a great favourite among ourselves, but
his songs attracted the lords of the saloon, who often leaned to hear
him over the rails of the hurricane-deck. He was somewhat pleased,
but not at all abashed, by this attention; and one night, in the
midst of his famous performance of 'Billy Keogh,' I saw him spin half
round in a pirouette and throw an audacious wink to an old gentleman
above.

This was the more characteristic, as, for all his daffing, he was a
modest and very polite little fellow among ourselves.

He would not have hurt the feelings of a fly, nor throughout the
passage did he give a shadow of offence; yet he was always, by his
innocent freedoms and love of fun, brought upon that narrow margin
where politeness must be natural to walk without a fall. He was once
seriously angry, and that in a grave, quiet manner, because they
supplied no fish on Friday; for Barney was a conscientious Catholic.
He had likewise strict notions of refinement; and when, late one
evening, after the women had retired, a young Scotsman struck up an
indecent song, Barney's drab clothes were immediately missing from
the group. His taste was for the society of gentlemen, of whom, with
the reader's permission, there was no lack in our five steerages and
second cabin; and he avoided the rough and positive with a girlish
shrinking. Mackay, partly from his superior powers of mind, which
rendered him incomprehensible, partly from his extreme opinions, was
especially distasteful to the Irishman. I have seen him slink off
with backward looks of terror and offended delicacy, while the other,
in his witty, ugly way, had been professing hostility to God, and an
extreme theatrical readiness to be shipwrecked on the spot. These
utterances hurt the little coachman's modesty like a bad word.

THE SICK MAN

One night Jones, the young O'Reilly, and myself were walking arm-in-
arm and briskly up and down the deck. Six bells had rung; a head-
wind blew chill and fitful, the fog was closing in with a sprinkle of
rain, and the fog-whistle had been turned on, and now divided time
with its unwelcome outcries, loud like a bull, thrilling and intense
like a mosquito. Even the watch lay somewhere snugly out of sight.

For some time we observed something lying black and huddled in the
scuppers, which at last heaved a little and moaned aloud. We ran to
the rails. An elderly man, but whether passenger or seaman it was
impossible in the darkness to determine, lay grovelling on his belly
in the wet scuppers, and kicking feebly with his outspread toes. We
asked him what was amiss, and he replied incoherently, with a strange
accent and in a voice unmanned by terror, that he had cramp in the
stomach, that he had been ailing all day, had seen the doctor twice,
and had walked the deck against fatigue till he was overmastered and
had fallen where we found him.

Jones remained by his side, while O'Reilly and I hurried off to seek
the doctor. We knocked in vain at the doctor's cabin; there came no
reply; nor could we find any one to guide us. It was no time for
delicacy; so we ran once more forward; and I, whipping up a ladder
and touching my hat to the officer of the watch, addressed him as
politely as I could -

'I beg your pardon, sir; but there is a man lying bad with cramp in
the lee scuppers; and I can't find the doctor.'

He looked at me peeringly in the darkness; and then, somewhat
harshly, 'Well, I can't leave the bridge, my man,' said he.

'No, sir; but you can tell me what to do,' I returned.

'Is it one of the crew?' he asked.

'I believe him to be a fireman,' I replied.

I dare say officers are much annoyed by complaints and alarmist
information from their freight of human creatures; but certainly,
whether it was the idea that the sick man was one of the crew, or
from something conciliatory in my address, the officer in question
was immediately relieved and mollified; and speaking in a voice much
freer from constraint, advised me to find a steward and despatch him
in quest of the doctor, who would now be in the smoking-room over his
pipe.

One of the stewards was often enough to be found about this hour down
our companion, Steerage No. 2 and 3; that was his smoking-room of a
night. Let me call him Blackwood. O'Reilly and I rattled down the
companion, breathing hurry; and in his shirt-sleeves and perched
across the carpenters bench upon one thigh, found Blackwood; a neat,
bright, dapper, Glasgow-looking man, with a bead of an eye and a rank
twang in his speech. I forget who was with him, but the pair were
enjoying a deliberate talk over their pipes. I dare say he was tired
with his day's work, and eminently comfortable at that moment; and
the truth is, I did not stop to consider his feelings, but told my
story in a breath.

'Steward,' said I, 'there's a man lying bad with cramp, and I can't
find the doctor.'

He turned upon me as pert as a sparrow, but with a black look that is
the prerogative of man; and taking his pipe out of his mouth -

'That's none of my business,' said he. 'I don't care.'

I could have strangled the little ruffian where he sat. The thought
of his cabin civility and cabin tips filled me with indignation. I
glanced at O'Reilly; he was pale and quivering, and looked like
assault and battery, every inch of him. But we had a better card
than violence.

'You will have to make it your business,' said I, 'for I am sent to
you by the officer on the bridge.'

Blackwood was fairly tripped. He made no answer, but put out his
pipe, gave me one murderous look, and set off upon his errand
strolling. From that day forward, I should say, he improved to me in
courtesy, as though he had repented his evil speech and were anxious
to leave a better impression.

When we got on deck again, Jones was still beside the sick man; and
two or three late stragglers had gathered round, and were offering
suggestions. One proposed to give the patient water, which was
promptly negatived. Another bade us hold him up; he himself prayed
to be let lie; but as it was at least as well to keep him off the
streaming decks, O'Reilly and I supported him between us. It was
only by main force that we did so, and neither an easy nor an
agreeable duty; for he fought in his paroxysms like a frightened
child, and moaned miserably when he resigned himself to our control.

'O let me lie!' he pleaded. 'I'll no' get better anyway.'  And then,
with a moan that went to my heart, 'O why did I come upon this
miserable journey?'

I was reminded of the song which I had heard a little while before in
the close, tossing steerage: 'O why left I my hame?'

Meantime Jones, relieved of his immediate charge, had gone off to the
galley, where we could see a light. There he found a belated cook
scouring pans by the radiance of two lanterns, and one of these he
sought to borrow. The scullion was backward. 'Was it one of the
crew?' he asked. And when Jones, smitten with my theory, had assured
him that it was a fireman, he reluctantly left his scouring and came
towards us at an easy pace, with one of the lanterns swinging from
his finger. The light, as it reached the spot, showed us an elderly
man, thick-set, and grizzled with years; but the shifting and coarse
shadows concealed from us the expression and even the design of his
face.

So soon as the cook set eyes on him he gave a sort of whistle.

'IT'S ONLY A PASSENGER!' said he; and turning about, made, lantern
and all, for the galley.

'He's a man anyway,' cried Jones in indignation.

'Nobody said he was a woman,' said a gruff voice, which I recognised
for that of the bo's'un.

All this while there was no word of Blackwood or the doctor; and now
the officer came to our side of the ship and asked, over the
hurricane-deck rails, if the doctor were not yet come. We told him
not.

'No?' he repeated with a breathing of anger; and we saw him hurry aft
in person.

Ten minutes after the doctor made his appearance deliberately enough
and examined our patient with the lantern. He made little of the
case, had the man brought aft to the dispensary, dosed him, and sent
him forward to his bunk. Two of his neighbours in the steerage had
now come to our assistance, expressing loud sorrow that such 'a fine
cheery body' should be sick; and these, claiming a sort of
possession, took him entirely under their own care. The drug had
probably relieved him, for he struggled no more, and was led along
plaintive and patient, but protesting. His heart recoiled at the
thought of the steerage. 'O let me lie down upon the bieldy side,'
he cried; 'O dinna take me down!'  And again: 'O why did ever I come
upon this miserable voyage?'  And yet once more, with a gasp and a
wailing prolongation of the fourth word: 'I had no CALL to come.'  
But there he was; and by the doctor's orders and the kind force of
his two shipmates disappeared down the companion of Steerage No.1
into the den allotted him.

At the foot of our own companion, just where I found Blackwood, Jones
and the bo's'un were now engaged in talk. This last was a gruff,
cruel-looking seaman, who must have passed near half a century upon
the seas; square-headed, goat-bearded, with heavy blond eyebrows, and
an eye without radiance, but inflexibly steady and hard. I had not
forgotten his rough speech; but I remembered also that he had helped
us about the lantern; and now seeing him in conversation with Jones,
and being choked with indignation, I proceeded to blow off my steam.

'Well,' said I, 'I make you my compliments upon your steward,' and
furiously narrated what had happened.

'I've nothing to do with him,' replied the bo's'un. 'They're all
alike. They wouldn't mind if they saw you all lying dead one upon
the top of another.'

This was enough. A very little humanity went a long way with me
after the experience of the evening. A sympathy grew up at once
between the bo's'un and myself; and that night, and during the next
few days, I learned to appreciate him better. He was a remarkable
type, and not at all the kind of man you find in books. He had been
at Sebastopol under English colours; and again in a States ship,
'after the ALABAMA, and praying God we shouldn't find her.'  He was a
high Tory and a high Englishman. No manufacturer could have held
opinions more hostile to the working man and his strikes. 'The
workmen,' he said, 'think nothing of their country. They think of
nothing but themselves. They're damned greedy, selfish fellows.'  He
would not hear of the decadence of England. 'They say they send us
beef from America,' he argued; 'but who pays for it? All the money
in the world's in England.'  The Royal Navy was the best of possible
services, according to him. 'Anyway the officers are gentlemen,'
said he; 'and you can't get hazed to death by a damned non-
commissioned - as you can in the army.'  Among nations, England was
the first; then came France. He respected the French navy and liked
the French people; and if he were forced to make a new choice in
life, 'by God, he would try Frenchmen!'  For all his looks and rough,
cold manners, I observed that children were never frightened by him;
they divined him at once to be a friend; and one night when he had
chalked his hand and clothes, it was incongruous to hear this
formidable old salt chuckling over his boyish monkey trick.

In the morning, my first thought was of the sick man. I was afraid I
should not recognise him, baffling had been the light of the lantern;
and found myself unable to decide if he were Scots, English, or
Irish. He had certainly employed north-country words and elisions;
but the accent and the pronunciation seemed unfamiliar and
incongruous in my ear.

To descend on an empty stomach into Steerage No. 1, was an adventure
that required some nerve. The stench was atrocious; each respiration
tasted in the throat like some horrible kind of cheese; and the
squalid aspect of the place was aggravated by so many people worming
themselves into their clothes in twilight of the bunks. You may
guess if I was pleased, not only for him, but for myself also, when I
heard that the sick man was better and had gone on deck.

The morning was raw and foggy, though the sun suffused the fog with
pink and amber; the fog-horn still blew, stertorous and intermittent;
and to add to the discomfort, the seamen were just beginning to wash
down the decks. But for a sick man this was heaven compared to the
steerage. I found him standing on the hot-water pipe, just forward
of the saloon deck house. He was smaller than I had fancied, and
plain-looking; but his face was distinguished by strange and
fascinating eyes, limpid grey from a distance, but, when looked into,
full of changing colours and grains of gold. His manners were mild
and uncompromisingly plain; and I soon saw that, when once started,
he delighted to talk. His accent and language had been formed in the
most natural way, since he was born in Ireland, had lived a quarter
of a century on the banks of Tyne, and was married to a Scots wife.
A fisherman in the season, he had fished the east coast from
Fisherrow to Whitby. When the season was over, and the great boats,
which required extra hands, were once drawn up on shore till the next
spring, he worked as a labourer about chemical furnaces, or along the
wharves unloading vessels. In this comparatively humble way of life
he had gathered a competence, and could speak of his comfortable
house, his hayfield, and his garden. On this ship, where so many
accomplished artisans were fleeing from starvation, he was present on
a pleasure trip to visit a brother in New York.

Ere he started, he informed me, he had been warned against the
steerage and the steerage fare, and recommended to bring with him a
ham and tea and a spice loaf. But he laughed to scorn such counsels.
'I'm not afraid,' he had told his adviser; 'I'll get on for ten days.
I've not been a fisherman for nothing.'  For it is no light matter,
as he reminded me, to be in an open boat, perhaps waist-deep with
herrings, day breaking with a scowl, and for miles on every hand lee-
shores, unbroken, iron-bound, surf-beat, with only here and there an
anchorage where you dare not lie, or a harbour impossible to enter
with the wind that blows. The life of a North Sea fisher is one long
chapter of exposure and hard work and insufficient fare; and even if
he makes land at some bleak fisher port, perhaps the season is bad or
his boat has been unlucky and after fifty hours' unsleeping vigilance
and toil, not a shop will give him credit for a loaf of bread. Yet
the steerage of the emigrant ship had been too vile for the endurance
of a man thus rudely trained. He had scarce eaten since he came on
board, until the day before, when his appetite was tempted by some
excellent pea-soup. We were all much of the same mind on board, and
beginning with myself, had dined upon pea-soup not wisely but too
well; only with him the excess had been punished, perhaps because he
was weakened by former abstinence, and his first meal had resulted in
a cramp. He had determined to live henceforth on biscuit; and when,
two months later, he should return to England, to make the passage by
saloon. The second cabin, after due inquiry, he scouted as another
edition of the steerage.

He spoke apologetically of his emotion when ill. 'Ye see, I had no
call to be here,' said he; 'and I thought it was by with me last
night. I've a good house at home, and plenty to nurse me, and I had
no real call to leave them.'  Speaking of the attentions he had
received from his shipmates generally, 'they were all so kind,' he
said, 'that there's none to mention.'  And except in so far as I
might share in this, he troubled me with no reference to my services.

But what affected me in the most lively manner was the wealth of this
day-labourer, paying a two months' pleasure visit to the States, and
preparing to return in the saloon, and the new testimony rendered by
his story, not so much to the horrors of the steerage as to the
habitual comfort of the working classes. One foggy, frosty December
evening, I encountered on Liberton Hill, near Edinburgh, an Irish
labourer trudging homeward from the fields. Our roads lay together,
and it was natural that we should fall into talk. He was covered
with mud; an inoffensive, ignorant creature, who thought the Atlantic
Cable was a secret contrivance of the masters the better to oppress
labouring mankind; and I confess I was astonished to learn that he
had nearly three hundred pounds in the bank. But this man had
travelled over most of the world, and enjoyed wonderful opportunities
on some American railroad, with two dollars a shift and double pay on
Sunday and at night; whereas my fellow-passenger had never quitted
Tyneside, and had made all that he possessed in that same accursed,
down-falling England, whence skilled mechanics, engineers,
millwrights, and carpenters were fleeing as from the native country
of starvation.

Fitly enough, we slid off on the subject of strikes and wages and
hard times. Being from the Tyne, and a man who had gained and lost
in his own pocket by these fluctuations, he had much to say, and held
strong opinions on the subject. He spoke sharply of the masters,
and, when I led him on, of the men also. The masters had been
selfish and obstructive, the men selfish, silly, and light-headed.
He rehearsed to me the course of a meeting at which he had been
present, and the somewhat long discourse which he had there
pronounced, calling into question the wisdom and even the good faith
of the Union delegates; and although he had escaped himself through
flush times and starvation times with a handsomely provided purse, he
had so little faith in either man or master, and so profound a terror
for the unerring Nemesis of mercantile affairs, that he could think
of no hope for our country outside of a sudden and complete political
subversion. Down must go Lords and Church and Army; and capital, by
some happy direction, must change hands from worse to better, or
England stood condemned. Such principles, he said, were growing
'like a seed.'

From this mild, soft, domestic man, these words sounded unusually
ominous and grave. I had heard enough revolutionary talk among my
workmen fellow-passengers; but most of it was hot and turgid, and
fell discredited from the lips of unsuccessful men. This man was
calm; he had attained prosperity and ease; he disapproved the policy
which had been pursued by labour in the past; and yet this was his
panacea, - to rend the old country from end to end, and from top to
bottom, and in clamour and civil discord remodel it with the hand of
violence.

THE STOWAWAYS

On the Sunday, among a party of men who were talking in our
companion, Steerage No. 2 and 3, we remarked a new figure. He wore
tweed clothes, well enough made if not very fresh, and a plain
smoking-cap. His face was pale, with pale eyes, and spiritedly
enough designed; but though not yet thirty, a sort of blackguardly
degeneration had already overtaken his features. The fine nose had
grown fleshy towards the point, the pale eyes were sunk in fat. His
hands were strong and elegant; his experience of life evidently
varied; his speech full of pith and verve; his manners forward, but
perfectly presentable. The lad who helped in the second cabin told
me, in answer to a question, that he did not know who he was, but
thought, 'by his way of speaking, and because he was so polite, that
he was some one from the saloon.'

I was not so sure, for to me there was something equivocal in his air
and bearing. He might have been, I thought, the son of some good
family who had fallen early into dissipation and run from home. But,
making every allowance, how admirable was his talk! I wish you could
have heard hin, tell his own stories. They were so swingingly set
forth, in such dramatic language, and illustrated here and there by
such luminous bits of acting, that they could only lose in any
reproduction. There were tales of the P. and O. Company, where he
had been an officer; of the East Indies, where in former years he had
lived lavishly; of the Royal Engineers, where he had served for a
period; and of a dozen other sides of life, each introducing some
vigorous thumb-nail portrait. He had the talk to himself that night,
we were all so glad to listen. The best talkers usually address
themselves to some particular society; there they are kings,
elsewhere camp-followers, as a man may know Russian and yet be
ignorant of Spanish; but this fellow had a frank, headlong power of
style, and a broad, human choice of subject, that would have turned
any circle in the world into a circle of hearers. He was a Homeric
talker, plain, strong, and cheerful; and the things and the people of
which he spoke became readily and clearly present to the minds of
those who heard him. This, with a certain added colouring of
rhetoric and rodomontade, must have been the style of Burns, who
equally charmed the ears of duchesses and hostlers.

Yet freely and personally as he spoke, many points remained obscure
in his narration. The Engineers, for instance, was a service which
he praised highly; it is true there would be trouble with the
sergeants; but then the officers were gentlemen, and his own, in
particular, one among ten thousand. It sounded so far exactly like
an episode in the rakish, topsy-turvy life of such an one as I had
imagined. But then there came incidents more doubtful, which showed
an almost impudent greed after gratuities, and a truly impudent
disregard for truth. And then there was the tale of his departure.
He had wearied, it seems, of Woolwich, and one fine day, with a
companion, slipped up to London for a spree. I have a suspicion that
spree was meant to be a long one; but God disposes all things; and
one morning, near Westminster Bridge, whom should he come across but
the very sergeant who had recruited him at first! What followed? He
himself indicated cavalierly that he had then resigned. Let us put
it so. But these resignations are sometimes very trying.

At length, after having delighted us for hours, he took himself away
from the companion; and I could ask Mackay who and what he was.
'That?' said Mackay. 'Why, that's one of the stowaways.'

'No man,' said the same authority, 'who has had anything to do with
the sea, would ever think of paying for a passage.'  I give the
statement as Mackay's, without endorsement; yet I am tempted to
believe that it contains a grain of truth; and if you add that the
man shall be impudent and thievish, or else dead-broke, it may even
pass for a fair representation of the facts. We gentlemen of England
who live at home at ease have, I suspect, very insufficient ideas on
the subject. All the world over, people are stowing away in coal-
holes and dark corners, and when ships are once out to sea, appearing
again, begrimed and bashful, upon deck. The career of these sea-
tramps partakes largely of the adventurous. They may be poisoned by
coal-gas, or die by starvation in their place of concealment; or when
found they may be clapped at once and ignominiously into irons, thus
to be carried to their promised land, the port of destination, and
alas! brought back in the same way to that from which they started,
and there delivered over to the magistrates and the seclusion of a
county jail. Since I crossed the Atlantic, one miserable stowaway
was found in a dying state among the fuel, uttered but a word or two,
and departed for a farther country than America.

When the stowaway appears on deck, he has but one thing to pray for:
that he be set to work, which is the price and sign of his
forgiveness. After half an hour with a swab or a bucket, he feels
himself as secure as if he had paid for his passage. It is not
altogether a bad thing for the company, who get more or less
efficient hands for nothing but a few plates of junk and duff; and
every now and again find themselves better paid than by a whole
family of cabin passengers. Not long ago, for instance, a packet was
saved from nearly certain loss by the skill and courage of a stowaway
engineer. As was no more than just, a handsome subscription rewarded
him for his success: but even without such exceptional good fortune,
as things stand in England and America, the stowaway will often make
a good profit out of his adventure. Four engineers stowed away last
summer on the same ship, the CIRCASSIA; and before two days after
their arrival each of the four had found a comfortable berth. This
was the most hopeful tale of emigration that I heard from first to
last; and as you see, the luck was for stowaways.

My curiosity was much inflamed by what I heard; and the next morning,
as I was making the round of the ship, I was delighted to find the
ex-Royal Engineer engaged in washing down the white paint of a deck
house. There was another fellow at work beside him, a lad not more
than twenty, in the most miraculous tatters, his handsome face sown
with grains of beauty and lighted up by expressive eyes. Four
stowaways had been found aboard our ship before she left the Clyde,
but these two had alone escaped the ignominy of being put ashore.
Alick, my acquaintance of last night, was Scots by birth, and by
trade a practical engineer; the other was from Devonshire, and had
been to sea before the mast. Two people more unlike by training,
character, and habits it would be hard to imagine; yet here they were
together, scrubbing paint.

Alick had held all sorts of good situations, and wasted many
opportunities in life. I have heard him end a story with these
words: 'That was in my golden days, when I used finger-glasses.'  
Situation after situation failed him; then followed the depression of
trade, and for months he had hung round with other idlers, playing
marbles all day in the West Park, and going home at night to tell his
landlady how he had been seeking for a job. I believe this kind of
existence was not unpleasant to Alick himself, and he might have long
continued to enjoy idleness and a life on tick; but he had a comrade,
let us call him Brown, who grew restive. This fellow was continually
threatening to slip his cable for the States, and at last, one
Wednesday, Glasgow was left widowed of her Brown. Some months
afterwards, Alick met another old chum in Sauchiehall Street.

'By the bye, Alick,' said he, 'I met a gentleman in New York who was
asking for you.'

'Who was that?' asked Alick.

'The new second engineer on board the SO-AND-SO,' was the reply.

'Well, and who is he?'

'Brown, to be sure.'

For Brown had been one of the fortunate quartette aboard the
CIRCASSIA. If that was the way of it in the States, Alick