Having entered the cabin, it is always an interesting question on which side we shall sit,—not to say at which end of the boat. I think that temperament has much to do with the decision of these questions. And it might be well for some psychologist and sociologist to investigate why it is that certain persons will instinctively select the rear of the cabin and others advance to the front; also why some will invariably take their seats on the outer and others on the inner side of the cabin. This being with myself not a matter of instinct but of reason, perhaps my experience is of little value, but I freely and confidentially offer it in the interests of science. I choose the inner row of seats for the following reasons: first, they are warmer in winter by reason of the steam-pipes which run underneath them, and cooler in summer by being more directly in the draught from the open doors; secondly, because the boat is steadier there, and one can read one's paper, if so inclined, with less painful adjustment of the eyes to the shaking type; but chiefly because in that position one has before one the panorama of the river, which is the next best thing to being out on deck. One of the mysteries of human nature is that so large a proportion of ferry-passengers appear to take no more notice of the glorious scenes through which they pass twice a day than if it were a tunnel. They will hurry into the cabin in all weathers, seat themselves with their backs to the river, and spend the voyage buried in the newspaper or gazing into vacancy. They do not seem even to appreciate the study of life afforded by their fellow-passengers. I am sure Dickens would have revelled in the opportunity and found no end of Quilps and Chadbands, Swivellers and Turveydrops, Little Nells and Mrs. Nicklebys, Pickwicks and Artful Dodgers. I have found splendid models for almost every type of civilization and not a few types of barbarism. And the eccentricities of dress are hardly less noteworthy.
One learns to enter heartily into the joys and sorrows of the groups, and even of the individuals, whom he thus watches perhaps from day to day. He comes to be a mind-reader, and works out many a little life-story, as did the ingenious Silas Wegg concerning the people who passed his corner or lived in the houses of the neighborhood. Among the more familiar types are college-students cramming for the day's recitation, giggling school-girls, dapper clerks, pert messenger-boys improving the time by reading a blood-and-thunder story-paper in the very smallest of type, business-men, all nerve in the morning, and in the afternoon chatting affably or half asleep, ladies keen for a shopping-"meet" on Fourteenth Street, housewives with market-baskets, and workingmen with tin pails. Each hour of the day develops its own tide and type of travel, beginning with the lowest class of laborer and ending with the belated reveller. There is a still hour in the morning, awhile before noon, when the idlers and the dissipated begin to dribble into or out of the city, and studies of the odd and the sad alike abound for the Hogarthian pencil and imagination.
The "basket brigade" constitutes a large and regular detachment of the trans-Hudson army. Pleasant it is (I can hear the parody-fiend murmur), when things are green and price of meat is low, to move amid the market-scene, where gourmands stout and housewives lean with baskets come and go. Tempting too, alike to the dainty and the thrifty. Like Robinet in the "Evenings at Home," it adds much to the relish of one's little supper to have selected it one's self out of a whole marketful and to inhale its imaginary savors all the way home. Then, it is so nice to surprise the wife with the earliest of the season, or to pour out upon the table a dozen golden oranges, or to bring a little light into the invalid's eye by a basket of grapes or a fragrant bunch of flowers, or to delight Tiny Tim with a trinket, or to let little Jacob "know what oysters is." Especially on Saturday afternoons does the basket brigade come out in force, and many a homely little idyl may be conjured out of the family groups or the purveying parents who throng and cumber the boat at such times. The capacities of the market-basket, as then and there revealed, are prodigious, rivalling those of the trunk of travel; and yet out of the cover will still protrude the legs of unadjustable "broilers" and the green fringes of garden-stuff, and all this not counting in the oyster-pail, or the great watermelon which has to be carried separately by its wooden handle. The epicurean prospect of the Sunday dinner reflected in the restful face as well as materialized in the basket can hardly fail to elicit a gentle thought from the sternest Sabbatarian's heart.
With the excursion-season comes another phase of our little idyllic studies, as we watch the groups and couples intent upon a picnic at the sea-side or among the Jersey villages. Here is a representative family party which I followed with my eyes, and still farther with my imagination, on their way to Coney Island on a fine, fresh summer morning. There was the grandma, a bright-eyed, beaming old lady, beginning to bend somewhat with years, but as pleased with the day's outing as any of them. There was the mother, sharing her responsibility with the neat and pretty young-lady daughter. There was a youth, somewhat of the Abel Garland type, who might have been the young lady's brother, but who was a happy man even if he was not. There was a small boy; and who need be told what a day that was for him? Lastly, there were two charming little ringleted girls, who walked hand in hand in the prettiest way, with eyes that fairly danced and feet that could hardly help doing so. There was no baby to utter a discordant note or to hang as a Damocles' sword of apprehension over the heads of the group. But in so affectionate and well-regulated a family I am not sure that its presence would not have constituted a new source of happiness. And by and by, as the afternoon waned, I could imagine the father meeting them at the beach, with perhaps the real brother (or would it be the real not-brother?), and coming home with them in the cool evening and the sweet moonlight.
On Saturdays there is an earlier current of home-going working-people; and it is easy to detect a quite different air about them from what they wear on other days. There is no shadow of next morning impending over them. One realizes anew the Sabbath as made for man,—the man who works,—and blesses the Son of Man who is "Lord also of the Sabbath." This is the evening when they carry home their reading for the week, as well as their Sunday dinner. I wish more could be said for the general quality, intellectual or moral, of this literature. But most of it is better than mental vacancy, and a great advance on the illiteracy in which these classes were sunk not so very long ago. And it must be borne in mind that the transient and sensational reading which so many of us carry in cars and cabins, or buy at news-stands, or take out of libraries, would misrepresent us if supposed to be all we had or loved to read. There is in more of these homes than perhaps we suspect a shelf with its well-thumbed "Pilgrim's Progress," its "Robinson Crusoe" with one cover gone, its odd volume of Waverley or Dickens, its copy of Burns or Longfellow, its row of school histories and science, and its pile of magazines.
At certain hours, when the trains are due, the basket brigade is reinforced by the carpet-bag battalion; and a crowd of home-coming or out-going travellers is a never-ending source of sympathetic and imaginative study to the leisurely looker-on. What an anachronism that word "carpet-bag" has become, by the way! I saw not long ago on the ferry-boat a genuine and literal specimen, which carried back my thoughts for a generation to the day when bags were really made of carpet and the most fastidious social Bourbon did not disdain to carry them. They flourished in the age of shawls, and came in not long after the epoch of "gum" shoes. They were of every conceivable pattern, from the sober symphony in brown to a gorgeous wealth of color that might vie with the most audacious wall-paper of an æsthetic age. This "belated traveller" of a carpet-bag had all the appearance of a faded and bedraggled gentility,—was, in fact, a veritable tramp among luggage. It sagged down as it stood on the floor. It ran here and there into strings, as of shoes untied and coat fastened together by twine in lieu of buttons. And it was trampy with mouldy discoloration and travel-stains. It was of vast dimensions, and, as was always the way with carpet-bags, bulging in all directions with its contents. I was not surprised to discover, through its orifice, that it had long ceased to be a receptacle for clothing and was filled with honest workman's tools. Burglars, the police-reports tell us, affect the carpet-bag for their jimmies and the like, but in such case it may be depended on to be as reputable in appearance and as close-mouthed as the last defaulting treasurer or trustee. The modern luggage is a type of advanced thought, if not civilization, whether we consider the Saratoga trunk, the Russia-leather satchel, the school-boy's knapsack, or the commercial traveller's double-locked valise. There is "nothing like leather:" men live now in their trunks, and America's proudest contribution to the world is the railway-check.
But my boat bumps on the shore, and I must pass out, to the marching music of the rattling chains and the swashing tide, to my business,—perhaps a "better" one to be "about" than writing these idle observations on a North-River Ferry.