fill.
Last but not least, I come to my excellent friend Mr. Jones. It

would be difficult to say whether I was his right-hand man, or he
mine, during the voyage. Thus at table I carved, while he only

scooped gravy; but at our concerts, of which more anon, he was the
president who called up performers to sing, and I but his messenger

who ran his errands and pleaded privately with the over-modest. I
knew I liked Mr. Jones from the moment I saw him. I thought him by

his face to be Scottish; nor could his accentundeceive me. For as
there is a LINGUA FRANCA of many tongues on the moles and in the

feluccas of the Mediterranean, so there is a free or common accent
among English-speaking men who follow the sea. They catch a twang in

a New England Port; from a cockney skipper, even a Scotsman sometimes
learns to drop an H; a word of a dialect is picked up from another

band in the forecastle; until often the result is undecipherable, and
you have to ask for the man's place of birth. So it was with Mr.

Jones. I thought him a Scotsman who had been long to sea; and yet he
was from Wales, and had been most of his life a blacksmith at an

inland forge; a few years in America and half a score of ocean
voyages having sufficed to modify his speech into the common pattern.

By his own account he was both strong and skilful in his trade. A
few years back, he had been married and after a fashion a rich man;

now the wife was dead and the money gone. But his was the nature
that looks forward, and goes on from one year to another and through

all the extremities of fortune undismayed; and if the sky were to
fall to-morrow, I should look to see Jones, the day following,

perched on a step-ladder and getting things to rights. He was always
hovering round inventions like a bee over a flower, and lived in a

dream of patents. He had with him a patent medicine, for instance,
the composition of which he had bought years ago for five dollars

from an American pedlar, and sold the other day for a hundred pounds
(I think it was) to an English apothecary. It was called Golden Oil,

cured all maladies without exception; and I am bound to say that I
partook of it myself with good results. It is a character of the man

that he was not only perpetually dosing himself with Golden Oil, but
wherever there was a head aching or a finger cut, there would be

Jones with his bottle.
If he had one taste more strongly than another, it was to study

character. Many an hour have we two walked upon the deck dissecting
our neighbours in a spirit that was too purelyscientific to be

called unkind; whenever a quaint or human trait slipped out in
conversation, you might have seen Jones and me exchanging glances;

and we could hardly go to bed in comfort till we had exchanged notes
and discussed the day's experience. We were then like a couple of

anglers comparing a day's kill. But the fish we angled for were of a
metaphysical species, and we angled as often as not in one another's

baskets. Once, in the midst of a serious talk, each found there was
a scrutinising eye upon himself; I own I paused in embarrassment at

this double detection; but Jones, with a better civility, broke into
a peal of unaffected laughter, and declared, what was the truth, that

there was a pair of us indeed.
EARLY IMPRESSIONS

We steamed out of the Clyde on Thursday night, and early on the
Friday forenoon we took in our last batch of emigrants at Lough

Foyle, in Ireland, and said farewell to Europe. The company was now
complete, and began to draw together, by inscrutable magnetisms, upon

the decks. There were Scots and Irish in plenty, a few English, a
few Americans, a good handful of Scandinavians, a German or two, and

one Russian; all now belonging for ten days to one small iron country
on the deep.

As I walked the deck and looked round upon my fellow-passengers, thus
curiously assorted from all northern Europe, I began for the first

time to understand the nature of emigration. Day by day throughout
the passage, and thenceforward across all the States, and on to the

shores of the Pacific, this knowledge grew more clear and melancholy.
Emigration, from a word of the most cheerfulimport, came to sound

most dismally in my ear. There is nothing more agreeable to picture
and nothing more pathetic to behold. The abstract idea, as conceived

at home, is hopeful and adventurous. A young man, you fancy,
scorning restraints and helpers, issues forth into life, that great

battle, to fight for his own hand. The most pleasant stories of
ambition, of difficulties overcome, and of ultimate success, are but

as episodes to this great epic of self-help. The epic is composed of
individual heroisms; it stands to them as the victorious war which

subdued an empire stands to the personal act of bravery which spiked
a single cannon and was adequately rewarded with a medal. For in

emigration the young men enter direct and by the shipload on their
heritage of work; empty continents swarm, as at the bo's'un's

whistle, with industrious hands, and whole new empires are
domesticated to the service of man.

This is the closet picture, and is found, on trial, to consist mostly
of embellishments. The more I saw of my fellow-passengers, the less

I was tempted to the lyric note. Comparatively few of the men were
below thirty; many were married, and encumbered with families; not a

few were already up in years; and this itself was out of tune with my
imaginations, for the ideal emigrant should certainly be young.

Again, I thought he should offer to the eye some bold type of
humanity, with bluff or hawk-like features, and the stamp of an eager

and pushing disposition. Now those around me were for the most part
quiet, orderly, obedient citizens, family men broken by adversity,

elderly youths who had failed to place themselves in life, and people
who had seen better days. Mildness was the prevailingcharacter;

mild mirth and mild endurance. In a word, I was not taking part in
an impetuous and conquering sally, such as swept over Mexico or

Siberia, but found myself, like Marmion, 'in the lost battle, borne
down by the flying.'

Labouring mankind had in the last years, and throughout Great
Britain, sustained a prolonged and crushing series of defeats. I had

heard vaguely of these reverses; of whole streets of houses standing
deserted by the Tyne, the cellar-doors broken and removed for

firewood; of homeless men loitering at the street-corners of Glasgow
with their chests beside them; of closed factories, useless strikes,

and starving girls. But I had never taken them home to me or
represented these distresses livingly to my imagination.

A turn of the market may be a calamity as disastrous as the French
retreat from Moscow; but it hardly lends itself to lively treatment,

and makes a trifling figure in the morning papers. We may struggle
as we please, we are not born economists. The individual is more

affecting than the mass. It is by the scenic accidents, and the
appeal to the carnal eye, that for the most part we grasp the

significance of tragedies. Thus it was only now, when I found myself
involved in the rout, that I began to appreciate how sharp had been

the battle. We were a company of the rejected; the drunken, the
incompetent, the weak, the prodigal, all who had been unable to

prevail against circumstances in the one land, were now fleeing
pitifully to another; and though one or two might still succeed, all

had already failed. We were a shipful of failures, the broken men of
England. Yet it must not be supposed that these people exhibited

depression. The scene, on the contrary, was cheerful. Not a tear
was shed on board the vessel. All were full of hope for the future,

and showed an inclination to innocentgaiety. Some were heard to
sing, and all began to scrape acquaintance with small jests and ready

laughter.
The children found each other out like dogs, and ran about the decks

scraping acquaintance after their fashion also. 'What do you call
your mither?' I heard one ask. 'Mawmaw,' was the reply, indicating,

I fancy, a shade of difference in the social scale. When people pass
each other on the high seas of life at so early an age, the contact

is but slight, and the relation more like what we may imagine to be
the friendship of flies than that of men; it is so quickly joined, so

easily dissolved, so open in its communications and so devoid of
deeper human qualities. The children, I observed, were all in a

band, and as thick as thieves at a fair, while their elders were
still ceremoniously manoeuvring on the outskirts of acquaintance.

The sea, the ship, and the seamen were soon as familiar as home to
these half-conscious little ones. It was odd to hear them,

throughout the voyage, employ shore words to designate portions of
the vessel. 'Go 'way doon to yon dyke,' I heard one say, probably

meaning the bulwark. I often had my heart in my mouth, watching them
climb into the shrouds or on the rails, while the ship went swinging

through the waves; and I admired and envied the courage of their