I have just come from one at which the discussion was mostly on the progress of missions in the Far West. (The old lady is Treasurer of a society for the conversion of the Apaches, or some other tribe.) Just now the sailors are heaving a log, which they do to ascertain the speed the ship is making. Mr. Inman, the owner of this ship, is a very wealthy man, and he has everything of the best. He furnishes his vessel with nothing but black walnut logs to heave, while the others use pine or poplar. Captain Leitch is a very humane man, and never uses profane language to his crew. On other ships the men who go aloft are compelled to climb tarred rope ladders, but Captain Leitch has passenger elevators rigged to the masts, such as you saw in the Palmer House in Chicago, in which they sit comfortably and are hoisted up by a steam engine.
“Great heavens! You are not surely going to send that?”
“Why not? What is an old lady in silver spectacles on a farm thirty miles from any water more than a well, going to know about a steamer? I must write her something, for she persuaded the old gentleman to let me take the trip. I ain’t ungrateful, I ain’t. I’ll give her one good letter, anyhow. Why, by the way you talk, I should suppose you never had a mother, and if you had that you didn’t know how to treat her. I hate a man who don’t love his mother and isn’t willing to sacrifice himself for her. All I can do for her now is to write to her, and write such letters as will interest her, and the dear old girl is going to get them, if the paper and ink holds out, and they are going to be good ones, too.”
I have got to be a good deal of a sailor, and if it were not for leaving you, which I couldn’t do, I believe I should take one of these ships myself. I know all about starboard and port—port used to be larboard—and I can tell the stern from the bow. On a ship you don’t say, “I will go down stairs,” but you say, “I will go below.” One would think that I had been born on the sea, and was a true child of the ocean.
Owing to my strictly temperate habits at home, and my absolute abstemiousness on the ship, I have escaped the horrors of sea sickness. As you taught me, true happiness can only be found in virtue. The wicked young man from New York has been sick half the time, as a young man who keeps a bottle in his room should be.
The nice woolen stockings you knit for me have been a great comfort, and all I regret is, I am afraid I have not enough of them to last me till I get home.
(The young villain had purchased in New York an assortment of the most picturesque hosiery procurable, which he was wearing with low cut shoes. The woolen stockings he gave to his room-steward.)
The tracts you put in my valise I have read over and over again, and have lent them since to the passengers who prefer serious reading to trashy novels and literature of that kind. What time I have had to spare for other reading, I have devoted to books of travel, so that I may see Europe intelligently.
“By the way,” he stopped to say, “are the Argyle rooms in London actually closed, and is the Mabille in Paris as lively as it used to be? Great Cæsar! won’t I make it lively for them!”
In another day we shall land in Liverpool, and then I shall be only five hours from London. I long to reach London, for I do so desire to hear Spurgeon, and attend the Exeter Hall meetings, as you desired me. But as we shall reach London on Tuesday, I shall be compelled to wait till the following Sunday—five long days.