“Not so young as he looks,” returned the other. “I shall have to get his permission before attempting anything on board, so we must wait here for a few minutes. You see, he has gone into his cabin with the owners to have a few parting words. While we are standing you’ll have one of the best opportunities of seeing the passengers, for most of them will come on deck to bid relatives and friends farewell, and wave handkerchiefs as the tug steams away, so keep your eyes open. Meanwhile, I will amuse you with a little chit-chat about emigrants. This vessel is one of the largest that runs to Australia.”
“Indeed,” responded the captain, with an absent look and tone that would probably have been the same if his friend had said that it ran to the moon. The missionary did not observe that his companion was hopelessly sunk in the sea of abstraction.
“Yes,” he continued, “and, do you know, it is absolutely amazing what an amount of emigration goes on from this port continually, now-a-days. You would scarcely believe it unless brought as I am into close contact with it almost daily. Why, there were no fewer than 26,000 emigrants who sailed from the Thames in the course of last year.”
“How many hogsheads, did you say?” asked the captain, still deeply sunk in abstraction.
A laugh from his friend brought him to the surface, however, in some confusion.
“Excuse me,” he said, with a deprecatory look; “the truth is, my mind is apt to wander a bit in such a scene, and my eyes chanced to light at the moment you spoke on that hogshead over there. How many emigrants, did you say?”
“No fewer than 26,000,” repeated the missionary good-naturedly, and went on to relate some interesting incidents, but the captain was soon again lost in the contemplation of a poor young girl who had wept to such an extent at parting from a female friend, then in the tug, that her attempts to smile through the weeping had descended from the sublime to the ridiculous. She and her friend continued to wave their kerchiefs and smile and cry at each other notwithstanding, quite regardless of public opinion, until the tug left. Then the poor young thing hid her sodden face in her moist handkerchief and descended with a moan of woe to her berth. Despite the comical element in this incident, a tear was forced out of Captain Bream’s eye, and we rather think that the missionary was similarly affected. But, to say truth, the public at large cared little for such matters. Each was too much taken up with the pressing urgency of his or her own sorrows to give much heed to the woes of strangers.
“People in such frames of mind are easily touched by kind words and influences,” said the missionary in a low voice.
“True, the ground is well prepared for you,” returned the captain softly, for another group had absorbed his attention.
“And I distribute among them Testaments, gospels, and tracts, besides bags filled with books and magazines.”