Down the St. Lawrence in a steamer, up the St. Lawrence on the maps, we sail through another day full of eager interest.
Everything is fresh, new, novel. Is it because we are in high latitudes that the river and the country look so high? I could fancy that we are on a plateau, overlooking a continent. Now the water expands on all sides like an ocean meeting the sky, and now we are sailing through hay-fields and country orchards, as if the St. Lawrence had taken a turn into our back-yard.
We hug the Canada shore, and thick woods come down the banks dipping their summer tresses in the cool Northern river,--broad pasture-lands stretch away, away from river to sky,--brown, dubious villages sail by at long intervals. On the distant southern shore America has stationed her outposts, and unfrequent spires attest a civilized, if remote life. In the sunny day all things are sunny, save when a Claude Lorraine glass lends a dark, rich mystery to every hill and cloud. The Claude Lorraine glass is a rara avus, and not only gives new lights to the scenery, but brings out the human nature on board in great force. The Anakim tells us of one man who asked him in a confidential aside, if it was a show, whereat we all laugh. Even I laugh at the man's ignorance,--I, a thief, an assassin, a traitor, who six weeks ago had never heard of a Claude Lorraine glass; but nobody can tell who has not tried it how much credit one gets for extensive knowledge, if only he holds his tongue. In all my life I am afraid I shall never learn as much as I have been inferred to know simply because I kept still.
Down the St. Lawrence in an English steamer, where everything is not so much English as John Bull-y. The servants at the table are thoroughly and amusingly yellow-plush,--if that is the word I want, and if it is not that, it is another; for Iam quite sure of my idea, though not of the name that belongs to it. The servants are smooth and sleek and intense. They serve as if it was their business, and a weighty business at that, demanding all the energies of a created being.
Accordingly they give their minds to it. The chieftain yonder, in white choker and locks profusely oiled and brushed into a resplendent expanse, bears Atlas on his shoulders.
His lips are compressed, his brow contracted, his eyes alert, his whole manner as absorbed as if it were a nation, and not a plum-pudding, that he is engineering through a crisis. Lord Palmerston is nothing to him, I venture to say. I know the only way to accomplish anything is to devote yourself to it;still I cannot conceive how anybody can give himself up so completely to a dinner, even if it is his business and duty.
However, I have nothing to complain of in the results, for we are well served, only for a trifle too much obviousness. Order and system are undoubtedly good things, but I don't like to see an ado made about them. Our waiters stand behind, at given stations, with prophetic dishes in uplifted hands, and, at a certain signal from the arch-waiter, down they come like the clash of fate. Now I suppose this is all very well, but for me I never was fond of military life. Under my housekeeping we browse indiscriminately. When we have nothing else to do, we have a meal. If it is nearer noon than morning, we call it dinner. If it is nearer night than noon, we call it supper, unless we have fashionable friends with us, and then we call it dinner, and the other thing lunch; and ten to one it is so scattered about that it has no name at all. At breakfast you will be likely to find me on the door-step with a bowl of bread and milk, while Halicarnassus sits on the bench opposite and brandishes a chicken-bone with the cat mewing furiously for it at his feet. A surreptitious doughnut is sweet and dyspeptic over the morning paper, and gingerbread is always to be had by systematic and intelligent foraging. Consequently this British drill and discipline are thoroughly alarming to me, and I am surprised and grateful to find that we are not individually regulated by a time-table. I expect a drum-beat;--one, incision; two, mastication; three, deglutition;--but what tyranny does one not expect to find under monarchical institutions? Put that into your next volume, intelligent British tourist.
Down the St. Lawrence with millionaires, and artists, and gay young girls, and sallow-faced invalids, and weary clergymen and men of business who do not know what to do with their unwonted leisure and find pleasuring a most unmitigated bore, and mothers with sick children, dear little unnatural pale faces and heavy eyes,--may your angels bring you health, tiny ones!--and, most interesting of all to me, a party of priests and nuns on their travels. They sit near me, and I can see them without turning my head, and hear them without marked listening. The priests are sleekheaded men, and such as sleep o' nights, ruddy, rotund, robust, with black hair and white bands, well-dressed, well-fed, well-to-do, jolly, gentlemanly, clique-y, sensible, shrewd, au fait. The nuns--now I am vexed to look at them. Are nuns expected to be any more dead to the world than priests? Then I should like to know why they must make such frights of themselves, while priests go about like Christians? Why shall a nun walk black, and gaunt, and lank, with a white towel wrapped around her face, all possible beauty and almost all attractiveness despoiled by her hideously unbecoming dress, while priests wear their hair and their hats and their coats and their collars like any other gentleman?
