“Harriet Lane.” The name of that unfortunate lady is often applied to the curious tinned meat provided aboard.
“This sauce.” A pink luxury poured over Sunday’s duff.
“Cheese.” In these closing lines the poet’s hope was to record the actual expression of the saloon in general on receipt of the steward’s pronouncement: “That there was no more cheese.”
XXIX
On Easter Day the sun–it was an old proverb–will dance; and this time he was in the mood. We lay in a basin like other tramps; beyond, there clustered red roofs with blessed ungainly angles, a pleasing sight after those southern flat ones of grey. Farther off, the church spire climbed above the trees, and though many people in their Sunday dress were walking that way, more were taking their rounds beside these docks.
It was as certainly good to be here as that spring was here. The chirrup of sparrows, jubilate of larks, noises of poultry, bleating of lambs from an enclosure of young fruit trees close at hand, and the play of children, were all comely and reviving.
Alas! that the Easter gift of the ship’s officers should have been so out of tune. An old gentleman of the same outlook as Polonius, the broker, brought a packet of letters aboard at breakfast, and among these were the wrong kind of Easter tidings–statements of their reductions in wages. They accepted this falling off without murmur, save for a few dry remarks.