UNIV. OF CALIFORNIA SIX MONTHS IN THE FEDERAL STATES. OUT AT SEA. It was not my purpose on going to America to write a book of travels. I did not intend, in other words, to republish my own diary. Everybody judges of the public by himself, and I own that, to me, the perusal of any other person's diary is singularly uninteresting. In an unknown country, the daily record of the traveller's adventures may possess a real value. On a journey such as mine it was not probable that a traveller would meet with any greater personal adventures than rough quarters, bad inns, and stormy weather. It would be a matter of little interest to the public, or, indeed, to myself, to record whether on such a night, in such a month, I slept at Philadelphia or at Baltimore, and whether I found the Girard House better B VIMU than the Continental, or vice versa. A fellow-passenger, on board the good ship Africa, kept a careful log of the vessel's progress, and kindly presented me with a copy. I always wonder, when I think of it, what conceivable satisfaction he expected to derive hereafter by the knowledge that, on one day during that weary, dreary blank which a sea voyage forms in human life, we were in longitude 42° 15′, and the next in longitude 46° 38'. There is no disputing about tastes; but, as far as my experience goes, the taste for statistical information is not a common one. The great majority of mankind (and, I confess, I agree with them) are perfectly content to travel by railroad without knowing, or caring to know, how many revolutions the wheels make per minute, and how many tons of coal are consumed at a given speed. It is for Gallios on such matters that I write. Of my voyage, therefore, I shall say but little. It was in the depth of winter, immediately after the settlement of the Trent affair, that I sailed for the New World. What with the storms at sea and the storms in the political ocean, our complement of passengers was of the scantiest; and yet, scanty as it was, it formed a strange epitome of the new country we were hurrying to. Most of us were men who had seen something of the world. We had amongst us an ex-colonial governor ; the son of an English earl, now a member of the Canadian parliament; a quondam man about town, settled in the Far West, to whom the prairie and Pall Mall were alike familiar; a Frenchman, whose home was in New York, but whose heart lay in Paris; a Swiss officer of distinction; a Scotch lawyer, who had married in America; a number of New York and Boston dry-goods men; and a young Englishman, travelling for pleasure, to visit his relatives in the States. With the exception of myself, perhaps, every one of us had his fortunes more or less connected with both hemispheres. Politics were dangerous subjects of conversation; and we avoided them as much as possible. We had strong pro-Union New Englanders amongst us, Government agents, Southern secessionists, and an unhappy bagman, who (I believe entirely on the strength of a somewhat forbidding cast of features) was regarded as a spy. The promotion, therefore, of mutual good fellowship put a check on political discussions; and even without this, we were not intellectually equal to them. In fact, what struck me most amongst the novelties of a long sea voyage, was the extraordinary lassitude of mind produced by it. It is a mystery to me still how we ate so much, slept so long, and did so little. We tried very hard, at times, to amuse ourselves, and failed lamentably. We told the same stock stories, heard the same stock jokes, and played at the same stock games. Being at sea, we did as sea-travellers do. We were first absurdly stiff, then unreasonably familiar, then personally offensive to each other, and finally |