At last I took him on the fly, and made a short stop; lost my balance and went down in a corner among my clothes. Then I gathered myself together and managed to cut the lemon open and to squeeze it. I lost half the juice in a lurch of the ship, just as I raised the glass to my lips; and in my hurry to save what was left I swallowed seeds enough to start a respectable lemon orchard. I think an artist could have made a series of interesting sketches had he witnessed the race between the lemon and me.
Dinner has a good deal of fear in it if the ship happens to be rolling nicely. Racks are put on the tables to keep things from falling off, and sometimes the rocking is so bad that even the racks are not altogether satisfactory. In front of you is a rack just wide enough to hold your plate, and, when you are taking soup, the edge of it is just even with the rack. If the ship makes up her mind she can tip your plate so that the soup will flow out into your lap, and after doing that she will tilt the other way and leave the side next to you quite dry. Your tumbler will assert the correctness of its name in more ways than one, unless it is very firmly placed and wedged in where it cannot fetch away.
The best way at such times is to hold your soup-plate in your hand and fasten your tumbler in the rack where the glasses are kept. Sometimes a joint of meat or a boiled turkey will leap from its plate and go off the table as easily as a live turkey could make the same movement. My friend, the Judge, caught a turkey in his lap one day, and his trowsers were so covered with oyster sauce that they might have been served up without serious trouble.
A New York matron was likewise honored with a visit of a leg of mutton, and I narrowly escaped from a dish of blanc mange that seemed determined to pay me a complimentary call. The desk where I used to write had a remarkable tendency to change its angle at every moment, and if my old desk in New York were to conduct itself thus, I should ask what it had been drinking.
Day after day we steamed along, sometimes getting a little assistance from our sails, but more frequently depending upon steam alone. Out of New York we were accompanied by a German steamer, but we soon lost sight of her in consequence of a divergence in our courses. Almost every day we saw steamers and sailing-ships, and sometimes we had three or four of them in sight. We were directly ports of England and America, and the wonder is, not that we saw so many vessels, but that so few of them came in sight. Our engines were not stopped after we left New York till we arrived at Queenstown, where our mails and some of our passengers were landed.
Time hangs heavily on one’s hands at sea. The first day out you are uneasy, if you are not sea-sick; you try to read and you can’t; you sit in one place awhile, then in another, then in another; and then you go somewhere else. You get over a page at a time; you shut and open your book a dozen times in an hour, and are as discontented as a weaning calf. You sit down to games of cards, but don’t feel like playing; you go forward and aft, and aft and forward, and really don’t know what to do on the track between the great with yourself. If the weather is fair you go on deck, and then you go below; and then on deck again. You wish yourself on shore, and you fall to counting the hours that must elapse before the voyage will end. You don’t feel like making the acquaintance of anybody, and nobody wants to make yours; and so the day goes on till you turn into your bunk and try to sleep. In the morning you rise feeling about as amiable as a bear with a sore head, though your nerves are more quiet than they were. Then you begin to make acquaintances, and in a couple of days the passengers know each other pretty fairly; enough, at any rate, for all practical purposes.
By the fourth day you have the peculiarities of everybody down to a dot; and about this time the spirit of mischief prevails. There are sure to be some waggish passengers ready for any kind of fun, and sometimes they are rather merciless in it. If there is a timid man on board they talk accident to him, and if there is a credulous man on board they fill him with yarns of the most frightful character. There was a youth on board from one of the eastern states, and he was constantly in fear lest the ship should sink. Two of the wags talked of accident till his hair stood on end and he dared not go to bed at night. At the table where the Judge and I were seated, there were two superannuated Englishmen who had been to New-York to visit some friends, and were going home without seeing anything in America outside Manhattan Island. I fear they had strange opinions of our country before they got back.