Nature and Human Nature Part 3

"'Can you make her out?' sais he; that's another sea tarm he has picked up; he will talk like a horse-marine at last.

"'Yes,' sais you, 'she is a Quang-Tonger.'

"'A Quang-Tonger?' sais the gall, and before the old c.o.o.n has disgested that hard word, she asks, 'what in natur is that?'

"'Why, Miss, Quang-Tong is a province of China, and Canton is the capital; all the vessels at Canton are called Quang-Tongers, but strangers call them Chinese Junks. Now, Miss, you have seen two new things to-day, a bottle-nosed porpoise and--'

"'Was that a bottle-nosed porpoise, Sir? why you don't say so! why, how you talk, why do they call them bottle-noses?'

"'Because, Miss, they make what is called velvet corks out of their snouts. They are reckoned the best corks in the world. And then, you have seen a Chinese Junk?'

"'A Chinese Junk,' sais the astonished trinket man. 'Well I vow! a Chinese Junk, do tell!' and one gall calls Jeremiah Dodge, and the other her father and her sister, Mary Anne Matilda Jane, to come and see the Chinese Junk, and all the pa.s.sengers rush to the other side, and say, 'whare, whare,' and the two discoverers say, 'there, there;'

and you walk across the deck and take one of the evacuated seats you have been longin' for; and as you pa.s.s you give a wink to the officer of the watch, who puts his tongue in his cheek as a token of approbation, and you begin to read again, as you fancy, in peace.

"But there is no peace in a steamer, it is nothin' but a large calaboose,1 chock full of prisoners. As soon as you have found your place in the book, and taken a fresh departure, the bonnet man sais, 'Please, Sir, a seat for a lady,' and you have to get up and give it to his wife's lady's-maid. His wife ain't a lady, but having a lady's-maid shows she intends to set up for one when she gets to home.

To be a lady, she must lay in a lot of airs, and to brush her own hair and garter her own stockins is vulgar; if it was known in First Avenue, Spruce Street, in Bonnetville, it would ruin her as a woman of fas.h.i.+on for ever.

1 Calaboose is a Southern name for jail.

"Now bonnet man wouldn't ask you to get up and give your place to his wife's hired help, only he knows you are a Yankee, and we Yankees, I must say, are regularly fooled with women and preachers; just as much as that walking advertis.e.m.e.nt of a milliner is with her lady's-maid.

All over America in rail carriages, stage coaches, river steamers, and public places, of all sorts, every critter that wears a white choker, and looks like a minister, has the best seat given him. He expects it, as a matter of course, and as every female is a lady, every woman has a right to ask you to quit, without notice, for her accommodation. Now it's all very well and very proper to be respectful to preachers; and to be polite and courteous to women, and more especially those that are unprotected; but there is a limit, tother side of which lies absurdity.

"Now if you had seen as much of the world as I have, and many other travelled Yankees, when bonnet man asked you to give up your seat to the maid, you would have pretended not to understand English, and not to know what he wanted, but would have answered him in French and offered him the book, and said certainly you would give it to him with pleasure, and when he said he didn't speak French, but what he desired was your place for the lady, you would have addressed her in German, and offered her the book, and when they looked at each other, and laughed at their blunder, in thus taking you for a Yankee, perhaps the man next to you would have offered his seat, and then when old bonnet man walked off to look at the Chinese Junk, you would have entered into conversation with the lady's-maid, and told her it was a rise you took out of the old fellow to get her along-side of you, and she would enjoy the joke, and you would have found her a thousand times more handsome and more conversational and agreeable than her mistress.

"But this wouldn't last long, for the sick gall would be carried up on deck agin, woman like, though ill, very restless, and chock full of curiosity to see the Chinese Junk also; so you are caught by your own bam, and have to move again once more. The bell comes in aid, and summons you to dinner. Ah, the scene in the Tower of Babel is rehea.r.s.ed; what a confusion of tongues! what a clatter of knives and forks and dishes! the waiter that goes and won't come back; and he who sees, pities but can't help you; and he who is so near sighted, he can't hear; and he who is intercepted, and made prisoner on his way.

"What a profusion of viands--but how little to eat! this is cold; that under-done; this is tough; that you never eat; while all smell oily; oh, the only dish you did fancy, you can't touch, for that horrid German has put his hand into it. But it is all told in one short sentence; two hundred and fifty pa.s.sengers supply two hundred and fifty reasons themselves, why I should prefer a sailing vessel with a small party to a crowded steamer. If you want to see them in perfection go where I have been it on board the California boats, and Mississippi river crafts. The French, Austrian, and Italian boats are as bad. The two great Ocean lines, American and English, are as good as anything bad can be, but the others are all abominable. They are small worlds over-crowded, and while these small worlds exist, the evil will remain; for alas, their pa.s.sengers go backward and forward, they don't emigrate--they migrate; they go for the winter and return for the spring, or go in the spring and return in the fall.

"Come, Commodore, there is old Sorrow ringing his merry bell for us to go to dinner. I have an idea we shall have ample room; a good appet.i.te, and time enough to eat and enjoy it: come, Sir, let us, like true Americans, never refuse to go where duty calls us."

After dinner, Cutler reverted to the conversation we had had before we went below, though I don't know that I should call it conversation, either; for I believe I did, as usual, most of the talking myself.

"I agree with you," said he, "in your comparative estimate of a sailing vessel and a steamer, I like the former the best myself. It is more agreeable for the reasons you have stated to a pa.s.senger, but it is still more agreeable to the officer in command of her on another account. In a sailing vessel, all your work is on deck, everything is before you, and everybody under your command. One glance of a seaman's eye is sufficient to detect if anything is amiss, and no one man is indispensable to you. In a steamer the work is all below, the machinery is out of your sight, complicated, and one part dependent on another. If it gets out of order you are brought up with a round turn, all standing, and often in a critical situation too. You can't repair damage easily; sometimes, can't repair at all.

"Whereas carrying away a sail, a spar, a topmast, or anything of that kind, impedes but don't stop you, and if it is anything very serious there are a thousand ways of making a temporary rig that will answer till you make a port. But what I like best is, when my s.h.i.+p is in the daldrums, I am equal to the emergency; there is no engineer to bother you by saying this can't be done, or that won't do, and to stand jawing and arguing instead of obeying and doing. Clippers of the right lines, size, and build, well found, manned, and commanded, will make nearly as good work, in ordinary times, as steamers. Perhaps it is prejudice though, for I believe we sailors are proverbial for that.

But, Slick, recollect it ain't all fair weather sailing like this at sea. There are times when death stares you wildly in the face."

"Exactly," sais I, "as if he would like to know you the next time he came for you, so as not to apprehend the wrong one. He often leaves the rascal and seizes the honest man; my opinion is, he don't see very well."

"What a droll fellow you are," said he; "it appears to me as if you couldn't be serious for five minutes at a time. I can tell you, if you were on a rocky lee-sh.o.r.e, with the wind and waves urging you on, and you barely holding your own, perhaps losing ground every tack, you wouldn't talk quite so glibly of death. Was you ever in a real heavy gale of wind?"

"Warn't I," said I; "the fust time I returned from England it blew great guns all the voyage, one gale after another, and the last always wuss than the one before. It carried away our sails as fast as we bent them."

"That's nothing unusual," said Cutler; "there are worse things than that at sea."

"Well, I'll tell you," sais I, "what it did; and if that ain't an uncommon thing, then my name ain't Sam Slick. It blew all the hair off my dog, except a little tuft atween his ears. It did, upon my soul. I hope I may never leave--"

"Don't swear to it, Slick," said he, "that's a good fellow. It's impossible."

"Attestin' to it will make your hair stand on eend too, I suppose,"

said I; "but it's as true as preachin' for all that. What will you bet it didn't happen?"

"Tut, man, nonsense," said he, "I tell you the thing is impossible."

"Ah!" said I, "that's because you have been lucky, and never saw a riprorious hurricane in all your life. I'll tell you how it was. I bought a blood-hound from a man in Regent's Park, just afore I sailed, and the brute got sea-sick, and then took the mange, and between that and death starin' him in the face, his hair all came off, and in course it blew away. Is that impossible?"

"Well, well," said he, "you have the most comical way with you of any man I ever see. I am sure it ain't in your nature to speak of death in that careless manner, you only talked that way to draw me out. I know you did. It's not a subject however to treat lightly, and if you are not inclined to be serious just now, tell us a story."

"Serious," sais I, "I am disposed to be; but not sanctimonious, and you know that. But here goes for a story, which has a nice little moral in it too.

"'Once on a time, when pigs were swine, and turkeys chewed tobacco, and little birds built their nests in old men's beards.'

"Pooh!" said he, turning off huffy like, as if I was a goin' to bluff him off. "I wonder whether supper is ready?"

"Cutler," sais I, "come back, that's a good fellow, and I'll tell you the story. It's a short one, and will just fill up the s.p.a.ce between this and tea-time. It is in ill.u.s.tration of what you was a sayin', that it ain't always fair weather sailing in this world. There was a jack-tar once to England who had been absent on a whaling voyage for nearly three years, and he had hardly landed when he was ordered off to sea again, before he had time to go home and see his friends. He was a lamentin' this to a s.h.i.+pmate of his, a serious-minded man, like you.

"Sais he, 'Bill, it breaketh my heart to have to leave agin arter this fas.h.i.+on. I havn't seen Polly now goin' on three years, nor the little un either.' And he actilly piped his eye.

"'It seemeth hard, Tom,' said Bill, tryin' to comfort him; 'it seemeth hard; but I'm an older man nor you be, Tom, the matter of several years;' and he gave his trowsers a twitch (you know they don't wear galluses, though a gallus holds them up sometimes), s.h.i.+fted his quid, gave his nor'wester a pull over his forehead, and looked solemncholly, 'and my experience, Tom, is, that this life ain't all beer and skittles.'

"Cutler, there is a great deal of philosophy in that maxim: a preacher couldn't say as much in a sermon an hour long, as there is in that little story with that little moral reflection at the eend of it.

"'This life ain't all leer and skittles.' Many a time since I heard that anecdote--and I heard it in Kew Gardens, of all places in the world--when I am disappointed sadly, I say that saw over, and console myself with it. I can't expect to go thro' the world, Cutler, as I have done: stormy days, long and dark nights, are before me. As I grow old I shan't be so full of animal spirits as I have been. In the natur of things I must have my share of aches, and pains, and disappointment, as well as others; and when they come, nothing will better help me to bear them than that little simple reflection of the sailor, which appeals so directly to the heart. Sam, this life ain't all beer and skittles, that's a fact."

CHAPTER III.

A WOMAN'S HEART.

As we approached the eastern coast, "Eldad," sais I, to the pilot, "is there any harbour about here where our folks can do a little bit of trade, and where I can see something of 'Fishermen at home?'"

"We must be careful now how we proceed, for if the 'Spitfire' floats at the flood, Captain Stoker will try perhaps to overhaul us."

"Don't we want to wood and water, and ain't there some repairs wanting," sais I, and I gave him a wink. "If so we can put into port; but I don't think we will attempt to fish again within the treaty limits, for it's dangerous work."

"Yes," sais he, touching his nose with the point of his finger, "all these things are needed, and when they are going on, the mate and I can attend to the business of the owners." He then looked cautiously round to see that the captain was not within hearing.

"Warn't it the 'Black Hawk' that was chased?" said he. "I think that was our name then."

"Why, to be sure it was," said I.

"Well," sais he, "this is the 'Sary Ann' of New Bedford now," and proceeding aft he turned a screw, and I could hear a board s.h.i.+ft in the stern. "Do you mind that?" said he: "well, you can't see it where you stand just now at present; but the 'Sary Ann' shows her name there now, and we have a set of papers to correspond. I guess the Britisher can't seize her, because the 'Black Hawk' broke the treaty; can he?"