| [4] | Count D’Orsay. |
ISLE OF WIGHT—RYDE.
“Instead of parboiling you with a soirée or a dinner,” said a sensible and kind friend, who called on us at Ryde, “I shall make a pic-nic to Netley.” And on a bright, breezy morning of June, a merry party of some twenty of the inhabitants of the green Isle of Wight shot away from the long pier, in one of the swift boats of those waters, with a fair wind for Southampton.
Ryde is the most American-looking town I have seen abroad; a cluster of white houses and summery villas on the side of a hill, leaning up from the sea. Geneva, on the Seneca lake, resembles it. It is a place of baths, boarding-houses, and people of damaged constitutions, with very select society, and quiet and rather primitive habits. The climate is deliciously soft, and the sun seems always to shine there.
As we got out into the open channel, I was assisting the skipper to tighten his bowline, when a beautiful ship, in the distance, putting about on a fresh tack, caught the sun full on her snowy sails, and seemed to start like an apparition from the sea.
“She’s a liner, sir!” said the bronzed boatman, suspending his haul to give her a look of involuntary admiration.
“An American packet, you mean?”
“They’re the prettiest ships afloat, sir,” he continued, “and the smartest handled. They’re out to New York, and back again, before you can look round, a’most. Ah, I see her flag now—stars and stripes. Can you see it, sir?”
“Are the captains Englishmen, principally?” I asked.
“No, sir! all ‘calkylators,’ sharp as a needle!”