Doctors tell us that change of air is usually beneficial, often necessary, nearly always agreeable. Relying on the wisdom of this opinion, we propose now to give the reader who has followed us thus far a change of air—by shifting the scene to the bosom of the broad Atlantic—and thus blow away the cobwebs and dust of the city.
Those who have not yet been out upon the great ocean cannot conceive—and those who have been out on it may not have seen—the splendours of a luminous fog on a glorious summer morning. The prevailing ideas in such circumstances are peace and liquidity! the only solid object visible above, below, or around, being the ship on which you stand.
Everything else is impalpable, floating, soft, and of a light, bright, silvery grey. The air is warm, the sea is glass; it is circular, too, like a disc, and the line where it meets with the sky is imperceptible. Your little bark is the centre of a great crystal ball, the limit of which is Immensity!
As we have said, peace, liquidity, luminosity, softness, and warmth prevail everywhere, and the fog, or rather, the silvery haze—for it is dry and warm as well as bright—has the peculiar effect of deadening sound, so that the quiet little noises of ship-board rather help than destroy the idea of that profound tranquillity which suggests irresistibly to the religious mind the higher and sweeter idea of “the peace of God.”
But, although intensely still, there is no suggestion of death in such a scene. It is only that of slumber! for the ocean undulates even when at rest, and sails flap gently even when there is no wind. Besides this, on the particular morning to which we call attention, a species of what we may call “still life” was presented by a mighty iceberg—a peaked and towering mountain of snowy white and emerald blue—which floated on the sea not a quarter of a mile off on the starboard bow. Real life also was presented to the passengers of the noble bark which formed the centre of this scene, in the form of gulls floating like great snowflakes in the air, and flocks of active little divers rejoicing unspeakably on the water. The distant cries of these added to the harmony of nature, and tended to draw the mind from mere abstract contemplation to positive sympathy with the joys of other animals besides one’s-self.
The only discordant sounds that met the ears of those who voyaged in the bark Ocean Queen were the cacklings of a creature in the hen-coops which had laid an egg, or thought it had done so, or wished to do so, or, having been sea-sick up to that time, perhaps, endeavoured to revive its spirits by recalling the fact that it once did so, and might perhaps do so again! By the way there was also one other discord, in the form of a pugnacious baby, which whimpered continuously, and, from some unaccountable cause, refused to be comforted. But that was a discord which, as in some musical chords, seemed rather to improve the harmony—at least in its mother’s ears.
The Ocean Queen was an emigrant ship. In her capacious hull, besides other emigrants, there were upwards of seventy diamonds from the Beehive in Spitalfields on their way to seek their fortunes in the lands that are watered by such grand fresh-water seas as Lakes Superior and Huron and Michigan and Ontario, and such rivers as the Ottawa and the Saint Lawrence.
Robert Frog and Tim Lumpy were among those boys, so changed for the better in a few months that, as the former remarked, “their own mothers wouldn’t know ’em,” and not only improved in appearance, but in spirit, ay, and even to some small extent in language—so great had been the influence for good brought to bear on them by Christian women working out of love to God and souls.
“Ain’t it lovely?” said Tim.
“Splendacious!” replied Bob.