snowy sail is drawing, and she moves with resistless force and matchless
grace through the water, while a boiling wreath of milky foam rushes
away from her bows, and swathes of white dapple the green river that
seems to pour past her majestic sides. The emigrants lean over the rail,
and gaze wistfully at us. Ah, how many thousands of miles they must
travel ere they reach their new home! Strange and pitiful it is to think
that so few of them will ever see the old home again; and yet there is
something bright and hopeful in the spectacle, if we think not of
individuals, but of the world's future. Under the Southern Cross a
mighty state is rising; the inevitable movement of populations is
irresistible as the tides of mid-ocean; and those wistful emigrants who
quietly wave their handkerchiefs to us are about to assist in working
out the destiny of a new world. Dull! The passing of that great vessel
gives matter for grave thought. She swings away, and we may perhaps try
to run alongside for a while, but the immense drag of her four towers of
canvas soon draws her clear, and she speedily looms once more like a
cloud on the horizon. Good-bye! The squat collier lumbers along, and her
leisurely grimy skipper salutes as we near him. It is marvellous to
reflect that the whole of our coal-trade was carried on in those queer
tubs only sixty years ago. They are passing away, and the gallant,
ignorant, comical race of sailors who manned them has all but
disappeared; the ugly sordid iron box that goes snorting past us,
belching out jets of water from her dirty side--that is the agency that
destroyed the colliers, and, alas, destroyed the finest breed of seamen
that ever the world saw! So rapidly do new sights and sounds greet us
that the night steals down almost before we are aware of its approach.
The day is for joy; but, ah, the night is for subtle overmastering
rapture, for pregnant gloom, for thoughts that lie too deep for tears!
If a wind springs up when the last ray of the sun shoots over the
shoulder of the earth, then the ship roars through an inky sea, and the