After strolling about for several hours we reached the boat, and found the case of liquor waiting for us, and proceeded to select our stateroom. This matter rose at once to a serious question in Don’s eyes. I resolved to leave it entirely to him, confident that his elegant manner would impress the steward. He at once devoted his entire attention to it, flitting from place to place in the forward and after cabins with the steward at his side, pointing out defects here, suggesting changes there, popping in and out of doors, describing his foreign experiences and the prime necessity of comfortable quarters, turning down the sheets, peering into cracks, feeling the pillows, casting a suspicious eye upon blankets, dissatisfied with all, and finally resolved to take one which could not be examined at the time for want of the key, but which the steward, who had been a respectful and sympathetic listener, assured him had none of the defects he had pointed out.
The immaculate stateroom was engaged, the boat pushed off, the key was obtained, and lo and behold! if it had none of these specified defects, it had another—one of the wooden supports, a huge beam eighteen inches broad, passed directly up through the foot of both the berths, reducing them to four feet six inches in length. When Don made this discovery his face was a study for his friends the artists; anger could not do justice to the occasion; despair, bewilderment, horror, astonishment, seemed blended, with a lurking suspicion that the sympathetic steward had been making game of him. He rushed to the office, could find nothing of the steward, but was informed that all the other staterooms were engaged.
However, after supper, the officials relented and gave us another room, enjoying mightily their joke, as I always believed it to be, although Don never could be brought to admit that they could by any possibility have dared to make fun of him, and insisted it was a blunder of that “stupid steward.”
We reached Detroit by five o’clock of the following morning, and as the boat for some wise reason remained there till two in the afternoon, we strolled round the city. It is a promising place, and has the finest street in the world, so the citizens assured us, called Jefferson Avenue. The market was well supplied with fish, and among them sturgeon, cut into slabs of yellow, flabby flesh; pale Mackinaw salmon, and darker ones from Lake Superior; white fish, the best of which were sold for six cents a pound; lake mullet, black and white bass, yellow and white perch, sun-fish, northern pickerel, suckers, pike-perch, cat-fish, and lake shad or lake sheepshead, called in French Bossu, or humpback—a very appropriate appellation. These fish had been for the most part taken in nets; but black bass are captured abundantly with the rod in the small lakes near Detroit, and in Canada opposite. The principal articles sold in the market, however, were strawberries and hoop-skirts; the latter being so numerous that Don remarked incidentally that the inhabitants absolutely skirt the market. This he evidently intended as a joke.
A few miles beyond Detroit is situated its pretentious rival, Port Huron, which is also a flourishing town, and has the handsomest street in the world; and opposite Port Huron are Sarnia and Point Edwards, the termini of the Grand Trunk and the Great Western railroads of Canada. We touched at Point Edwards at about eleven o’clock in the evening.
America is a great place; the people are upright, virtuous, honest, enterprising, energetic, brave, intelligent, charitable and public spirited; they are the finest race of men and the most beautiful and cultivated women in the world, but they do not know how to dine. To gobble down one’s victuals, regardless of digestion or decency, is not eating like Christians but feeding like animals; to thrust one’s fork or spoon into the dish appropriated to holding food for all, is uncleanly and offensive; to eat peas with a knife is bad enough, but to use it immediately afterwards to cut butter from the butter-plate is absolutely disgusting. No one who does these things is either a lady or a gentleman; and no one who cannot keep his arms at his side while cutting his meat is fit to eat at a public table.
There was one gentleman, as he would claim to be considered, who sat near us, who, although he had a proper silver fork, endeavored religiously to eat his peas on a knife that happened to have a small point. This operation, always difficult and dangerous, became, from the formation of the blade, almost impossible; the peas rolled off at every attempt, and the unfortunate rarely succeeded in carrying to his mouth more than one at a time, till finally reduced to despair, he seized a table-spoon, and with it devoured them in great mouthfuls.
The dinner was quite a lively scene; the ladies, although there was plenty of room, were smuggled in clandestinely before the gong was sounded, and the men, dreading the horrors of a second table, rushed for the remaining chairs, standing behind and guarding them religiously, but politely waiting till the ladies were seated. There was plenty of food, but each man immediately collected such delicacies as were near him, and he imagined he might need, and transferred them to his plate or a small saucer. There was abundance of time, no one having the slightest prospect of occupation after dinner, and yet every man, woman, and child set to work eating as though they expected at any moment to be dragged away and condemned to weeks of starvation.
The waiters, like all Americanized Irishmen, were independent if not insolent, and we overheard the following discourse between one of them and an unhappy wretch who had come in late and could obtain no attendance. The suffering individual began rapping on his plate with the knife till he attracted the notice of a passing waiter:
Waiter.—“Well, what are you making that noise for?”