"Oh, dear, yes; she lost all her clothes, and three large jars of preserves she made about a week ago, and sarce in accordance!" [A common Yankee phrase, often used instead of the word proportion.]
There was an honest Yorkshire farmer and his wife on board, and when the morning at length broke through pouring rain and driving mist, and the port to which they were bound loomed through the haze, the women were very anxious to know if their husbands, who slept in the gentlemen's cabin, were awake."
"They arn't stirring yet," said Mrs. G---, "for I hear Isaac (meaning her husband) breezing below"--a most expressive term for very hard snoring.
The same Isaac, when he came up to the ladies' cabin to take his wife on shore, complained, in his broad Yorkshire dialect, that he had been kept awake all night by a jovial gentleman who had been his fellow-traveller in the cabin.
"We had terrible noisy chap in t'cabin. They called him Mr. D---, and said he 'twas t'mayor of Belleville; but I thought they were a-fooning. He wouldn't sleep himself, nor let t'others sleep. He gat piper, an' put him top o' table, and kept him playing all t'night."
One would think that friend Isaac had been haunted by the vision of the piper in his dreams; for, certes, the jovial buzzing of the pipes had not been able to drown the deep drone of his own nasal organ.
A gentleman who was travelling in company with Sir A--- told me an anecdote of him, and how he treated an impertinent fellow on board one of the lake boats, that greatly amused me.
The state cabins in these large steamers open into the great saloon; and as they are often occupied by married people, each berth contains two beds, one placed above the other. Now it often happens, when the boat is greatly crowded, that two passengers of the same sex are forced to occupy the same sleeping room. This was Sir A---'s case, and he was obliged, though very reluctantly, to share his sleeping apartment with a well-dressed American, but evidently a man of low standing, from the familiarity of his manners and the bad grammar he used.
In the morning, it was necessary for one gentleman to rise before the other, as the space in front of their berths was too narrow to allow of more than one performing his ablutions at a time.
Our Yankee made a fair start, and had nearly completed his toilet, when he suddenly spied a tooth-brush and a box of tooth-powder in the dressing-case his companion had left open on the washstand. Upon these he pounced, and having made a liberal use of them, flung them back into the case, and sat down upon the only chair the room contained, in order to gratify his curiosity by watching how his sleeping partner went through the same process.