Chats in the Book-Room

by Horace N. Pym

It was this gentleman who, one morning, solemnly confided to a friend that he was a little suspicious of the drains on board!

Americanisms, which are now every one's property, were at this time—I am speaking of twenty years ago—not so common, and glided from Flossie's pretty lips most enchantingly. To be told on a wet morning, with half a gale of wind blowing, "to put on a skin-coat and gum-boots" to meet the elements, was at that day startling, if useful, advice. She professed a serious attachment for a New York cousin, aged sixteen, "Because," she said, "he is so dissolute, plays cards, smokes cigars, reads novels, and runs away when offered candy." Her quieter moments on deck were passed in reading 'Dombey and Son,' which, when finished, she pronounced to be all wrong, "only one really nice man in the book—Carker—and he ought to have married Floey."

Mr. Hugh Childers, then First Lord of the Admiralty, was a passenger on board our boat, and having with infinite kindness and patience explained to the child our daily progress with a big chart spread on the deck and coloured pins, was somewhat startled to see her execute a pas seul over his precious map and disappear down the nearest gangway, with the remark, "My sakes, Mr. Childers, how terribly frivolous you are!"

She had a youthful brother on board, who, one day at dinner, astonished his table by coolly saying, as he pointed to a most inoffensive old lady dining opposite to him, "Steward, take away that woman, she makes me sick!"

A stout and amiable friend of Flossie's, who shall be nameless in these blameless records, on coming in sight of land assumed, and I fear did it very badly, some emotion at the first sight of her great country, only to be crushed by her immediate order, given in the sight and hearing of some hundred delighted passengers, "Sailor, give this trembling elephant an arm, I guess he's going to be sick!" Luckily for him the voyage was practically over, but for its small remnant he was known to every one on board as the trembling elephant.

One day a pleasant little American neighbour at dinner touched one's sense of humour by naïvely saying, "If you don't remove that nasty little boiled hen in front of you, I know I must be ill."

Then there was a dull and solemn prig on board, who at every meal gave us, unasked, and apropos des bottes, some tremendous facts and statistics to digest, such as the number of shrimps eaten each year in London, or how many miles of iron tubing go to make the Saltash bridge. Finding one morning on his deck-chair, just vacated, a copy of Whitaker's Almanack and a volume of Mayhew's "London Labour and the London Poor," we recognised the source of his elucidations, and promptly consigned his precious books to a watery grave. Of that voyage, so far as he was concerned, the rest was silence.

Upon remarking to an American on board that the gentleman in question was rather slow, he brought down a Nasmyth hammer with which to crack his nut by saying, "Slow, sir; yes, he's a big bit slower than the hour hand of eternity!"