STEAMBOAT SIGHTS AND REFLECTIONS.
I am looking, from the steamer’s deck, upon as fair a sunrise as ever poet sang or painter sketched, or the earth ever saw. Oh, this broad blue, rushing river! sentinelled by these grand old hills, amid which the silvery mist wreaths playfully; half shrouding the little eyrie homes, where love wings the uncounted hours; while looming up in the hazy distance is the Babel city, with glittering spires and burnished panes—one vast illumination. My greedy eye with miserly eagerness devours it all, and hangs it up in Memory’s cabinet, a fadeless picture; upon which dame Fortune (the jilt) shall never have a mortgage.
Do you see yonder figure leaning over the railing of the boat, gazing on all this outspread wealth of beauty? One longs to hear his lips give utterance to the burning thoughts which cause his eye to kindle and his face to glow. A wiry sister (whose name should be “Martha,” so careful, so troubled looks her spinstership) breaks the charmed spell by asking him, in a cracked treble, “ifthemporters on the pier can be safely trusted with her bandbox and umberil.” My stranger eyes meet his, and we both laugh involuntarily—(pardon us, oh ye prim ones,)—without an introduction!
Close at my elbow sits a rough countryman, with so much “free soil” adhering to his brogans they might have been used for beet-beds, and a beard rivalled only by Nebuchadnezzar’s when he experimented on a grass diet. He has only one word to express his overpowering emotions at the glowing panorama before us, and that is “pooty”—houses, trees, sky, rafts, railroad cars and river, all are “pooty;” and when, in the fulness of a soul craving sympathy, he turned to his dairy-fed Eve to endorse it, that matter-of-fact feminine showerbath-edhis enthusiasm, by snarling out “pooty enough, I ’spose, butwhere’s my breakfast?”
Ah! here we are at the pier, at last. And now they emerge, our night-travellers, from state-room and cabin, into the fresh cool air of the morning. Venus and Apollo! what a crew. Solemn as a hearse, surly as an Englishman, blue as an indigo-bag! There’s a poor shivering babe, twitched from a warm bed by an ignorant young mother, to encounter the chill air of morning, with only a flimsy covering of lace and embroidery—there’s a languid southern belle, creeping out,à la tortoise, and turning up her little aristocratic nose as if she sniffed a pestilence—there’s an Irish bride (green as Erin) in a pearl-coloured silk dress surmounted by a coarse blanket shawl—there’s a locomotive hour-glass (alias a dandy), a blue-eyed, cravat-choked, pantaloon be-striped, vest-garnished, disgusting “institution!” (give him and his quizzing glass plenty of sea-room)—and there’s a clergyman, God bless his care-worn face, with a valise full of salted-down sermons and the long-coveted “leave of absence”—there’s an editor, kicking a newsboy for bringing “coals to Newcastle” in the shape of “extras”—and there’s a good-natured, sunshiny “family man,” carrying the baby, and the carpet-bag, and the travelling shawl, lest his pretty little wife should get weary—and there’s a poor bonnetless emigrant, stunned by the Babel sounds, inquiring, despairingly, the name of some person whom nobody knows or cares for—and last, but not least, there’s the wiry old maid “Martha,” asking “thimporters on the pier,” with tears in her faded green eyes, to be “keerful of her bandbox and umberil.”
On they go. Oh, how much of joy—how much of sorrow, in each heart’s unwritten history.