Anxious to get on to Cheshire, where, as they say of the mails, I had been due some days, and very anxious to get rid of the perfume of beer, beefsteaks, and bad soup, with which I had become impregnated at the inn, I got embarked in an omnibus at noon, and was taken to the railway. I was just in time, and down we dived into the long tunnel, emerging from the darkness at a pace that made my hair sensibly tighten and hold on with apprehension. Thirty miles in the hour is pleasant going when one is a little accustomed to it. It gives one such a contempt for time and distance! The whizzing past of the return trains, going in the other direction with the same velocity, making you recoil in one second, and a mile off the next—was the only thing which, after a few minutes, I did not take to very kindly. There were near a hundred passengers, most of them precisely the class of English which we see in our country—the fags of Manchester and Birmingham—a class, I dare say, honest and worthy, but much more to my taste in their own country than mine.
I must confess to a want of curiosity respecting spinning-jennies. Half an hour of Manchester contented me, yet in that half hour I was cheated to the amount of four and-six-pence—unless the experience was worth the money. Under a sovereign I think it not worth while to lose one’s temper, and I contented myself with telling the man (he was a coach proprietor) as I paid him the second time for the same thing in the course of twenty minutes, that the time and trouble he must have had in bronzing his face to that degree of impudence gave him some title to the money. I saw some pretty scenery between Manchester and my destination, and having calculated my time very accurately, I was set down at the gates of —— Hall, as the dressing bell for dinner came over the park upon the wind. I found another English welcome, passed three weeks amid the pleasures of English country life, departed as before with regrets, and without much more incident or adventure reached London on the first of November, and established myself for the winter.
SECOND VISIT TO ENGLAND.
Ship Gladiator, off the Isle of Wight,
Evening of June 9th, 1839.
The bullet which preserves the perpendicular of my cabin-lamp is at last still, I congratulate myself; and with it my optic nerve resumes its proper and steady function. The vagrant tumblers, the peripatetic teeth-brushes, the dancing stools, the sidling wash-basins and et-ceteras, have returned to a steady life. The creaking bulkheads cry no more. I sit on a trunk which will not run away with me, and pen and paper look up into my face with their natural sobriety and attention. I have no apology for not writing to you, except want of event since we parted. There is not a milestone in the three thousand four hundred miles I have travelled. “Travelled!” said I. I am as unconscious of having moved from the wave on which you left me at Staten Island as the prisoner in the hulk. I have pitched forward and backward, and rolled from my left cheek to my right; but as to any feeling of having gone onward I am as unconscious of it as a lobster backing after the ebb. The sea is a dreary vacuity, in which he, perhaps, who was ever well upon it, can find material for thought. But for one, I will sell at sixpence a month, all copyhold upon so much of my life as is destined “to the deep, the blue, the black” (and whatever else he calls it,) of my friend the song-writer.
Yet there are some moments recorded, first with a sigh, which we find afterward copied into memory with a smile. Here and there a thought has come to me from the wave, snatched listlessly from the elements—here and there a word has been said which on shore should have been wit or good feeling—here and there a “good morning,” responded to with an effort, has from its courtesy or heartiness, left an impression which will make to-morrow’s parting phrases more earnest than I had anticipated.—With this green isle to windward and the smell of earth and flowers coming to my nostrils once more, I begin to feel an interest in several who have sailed with me. Humanity, killed in me invariably by salt-water, revives, I think, with this breath of hawthorn.
The pilot tells us that the Montreal, which sailed ten days before us, has not yet passed up the channel, and that we have brought with us the first west wind they have had in many weeks. The sailors do not know what to say to this, for we had four parsons on board, and, by all sea-canons, they are invariable Jonahs. One of these gentlemen, by the way, is an abolitionist, on a begging crusade for a school devoted to the amalgam of color, and very much to the amusement of the passengers, he met the steward’s usual demand for a fee with an application for a contribution to the funds of his society! His expectations from British sympathy are large, for he is accompanied by a lay brother “used to keeping accounts,” whose sole errand is to record the golden results of his friend’s eloquence. But “eight bells” warn me to bed; so when I have recorded the good qualities of the Gladiator, which are many, and those of her captain, which are more, I will put out my sea lamp for the last time, and get into my premonitory “six feet by two.”
The George Inn, Portsmouth.—This is a morning in which (under my circumstances) it would be difficult not to be pleased with the entire world. A fair day in June, newly from sea, and with a journey of seventy miles before me on a swift coach, through rural England, is what I call a programme of a pleasant day. Determined not to put myself in the way of a disappointment, I accepted, without the slightest hesitation, on landing at the wharf, the services of an elderly gentleman in shabby black, who proposed to stand between me and all my annoyances of the morning. He was to get my baggage through the customs, submit for me to all the inevitable impositions of tide-waiters, secure my place in the coach, bespeak me a fried sole and green peas, and sum up his services, all in one short phrase of l. s. d. So putting my temper into my pocket, and making up my mind to let roguery take the wall of me for one day unchallenged, I mounted to the grassy ramparts of the town to walk off the small remainder of sea-air from my stomach, and admire everything that came in my way. I would recommend to all newly landed passengers from the packets to step up and accept of the sympathy of the oaks of the “king’s bastion” in their disgust for the sea. Those sensible trees, leaning toward the earth, and throwing out their boughs as usual to the landward, present to the seaward exposure a turned-up and gnarled look of nausea and disgust which is as expressive to the commonest observer as a sick man’s first look at his bolus. I have great affinity with trees, and I believe implicitly, that what is disagreeable to the tree can not be pleasant to the man. The salt air is not so corrosive here as in the Mediterranean, where the leaves of the olive are eaten off entirely on the side toward the sea; but it is quite enough to make a sensible tree turn up its nose, and in that attitude stands most expressively every oak on the “king’s bastion.”