s of the ship." Truly, they are "free,"
but whether "enlightened" also I had no opportunity of ascertaining. A
short ten minutes, and they are all scattered, and the piles of food
with them. Once more I look, and, behold! the table is again preparing.
Who can this be for? Doubts are speedily solved, as a mixture of niggers
and whites sit down to the festive hoard; it is the boys--_alias_
waiters--whose turn has come at last. Their meal over, the spare leaves
of the table are removed, half a dozen square tables dot the centre line
of the saloon, and all is comparatively quiet. This process takes place
at every meal--8 A.M., 1 P.M., and 5 P.M.--with the most rigid
punctuality.

Fancy my distress one evening, when, on opening my cabin-door, I beheld
a fellow-creature doubled up at the entry of the door opposite. I
thought the poor sufferer had a fit of cholera, and I was expecting each
instant to hear his screams; but hearing nothing, I examined the person
in question more minutely. It was merely a gentleman, who had
dispossessed himself of his jacket, waistcoat, trousers, and boots, not
forgetting his stockings; and then deliberately planting his chair in
the open entry of the door, and gathering up one foot on the seat
thereof, was amusing himself by cutting and picking the horny
excrescences of his pedal digits, for the benefit of the passengers in
the gentlemen's saloon; and, unfortunately, you could not be sure that
his hands would be washed before he sat next to you at breakfast in the
morning,--for I can testify that I have, over and over again, sat next
to people, on these Western waters, whose hands were scarce fit to take
coals out of a scuttle.

There is nothing I have here set down but what actually passed under my
own eye. You will, of course, find gentlemen on board, and many whose
manners there is nothing to complain of, and whose conversation is both
instructive and amusing; but you evidently are liable to find others to
realize the picture I have given of scenes in the gentlemen's saloon,
and, unless you have some acquaintance among the ladies, their saloon is
as sacred from a gentleman as the Sultan's harem. And whence comes all
this, except from that famous bugbear "equality?" Is there any real
gentleman throughout the Empire State who would, in his heart, approve
of this ridiculous hustling together of well-bred and ill-bred? But it
pleases the masses, and they must submit to this incongruous herding a