detaching your relatives and acquaintances from the trunks on which
they resolutely seat themselves, up to the moment when the paddles are
moving, and you are haunted continually by an ill-defined idea that
they may be carried off, and foisted on you--with the payment of their
passage, which, under the circumstances, you could not refuse--for the
rest of the voyage. Your friends will make their appearance at the most
inopportune moments, and from the most unexpected places,--dangling from
hawsers, climbing up paddle-boxes, and crawling through cabin windows at
the imminent peril of their lives. You are nervous and crushed by this
added weight of responsibility. Should you be a stranger, you will find
any number of people on board, who will cheerfully and at a venture take
leave of you on the slightest advances made on your part. A friend
of mine assures me that he once parted, with great enthusiasm and
cordiality, from a party of gentlemen, to him personally unknown, who
had apparently mistaken his state-room. This party,--evidently connected
with some fire company,--on comparing notes on the wharf, being somewhat
dissatisfied with the result of their performances, afterward rendered
my friend's position on the hurricane deck one of extreme peril and
inconvenience, by reason of skilfully projected oranges and apples,
accompanied with some invective. Yet there is certainly something to
interest us in the examination of that cheerless damp closet, whose
painted wooden walls no furniture or company can make habitable, wherein
our friend is to spend so many vapid days and restless nights. The sight
of these apartments, yclept STATE-ROOMS,--Heaven knows why, except it
be from their want of cosiness,--is full of keen reminiscences to most
Californians who have not outgrown the memories of that dreary interval
when, in obedience to nature's wise compensations, homesickness was
blotted out by sea-sickness, and both at last resolved into a chaotic
and distempered dream, whose details we now recognize. The steamer chair
that we used to drag out upon the narrow strip of deck and doze in,