It took a long while to see the boat, and the first thing he discovered was that a great many people had failed to secure staterooms or berths. They sat in chairs, and they lounged on sofas, and they were curled up on the floor; for the Columbia had received a flood of tourists who were going home, and a large part of the passengers of another boat that had been detained on account of an accident at Albany; so the steamer was decidedly overcrowded.
"There are more people aboard," thought Jack, "than would make two such villages as Crofield, unless you should count in the farms and farmers. I'm glad I came, if it's only to know what a steamboat is. I haven't spent a cent of my nine dollars yet, either."
Here and there he wandered, until he came out at the stern, and had a look at the foaming wake of the boat, and at the river and the heights behind, and at the grand spectacle of another great steamboat, full of lights, on her way up the river. He had seen any number of smaller boats, and of white-sailed sloops and schooners, and now, along the eastern bank, he heard and saw the whizzing rush of several railway trains.
"I'd rather be here," he thought. "The people there can't see half so much as I can."
Not one of them, moreover, had been traveling all over the world with Mr. Guilderaufenberg, and hearing and about kings and their "police."
Getting back to his old place was easier, now that he began to understand the plan of the Columbia; but, when Jack returned, his camp-stool was gone, and he had to sit down on the bare deck or to stand up. He did both, by turns, and he was beginning to feel very weary of sight-seeing, and to wish that he were sound asleep, or that to-morrow had come.
"It's a warm night," he said to himself, "and it isn't so very dark, even now the moon has gone down. Why—it's getting lighter! Is it morning? Can we be so near the city as that?"
There was a growing rose-tint upon a few clouds in the western sky, as the sun began to look at them from below the range of heights, eastward, but the sun had not yet risen.
Jack was all but breathless. He walked as far forward as he could go, and forgot all about being sleepy or tired.
"There," he said, after a little, "those must be the Palisades."