e had
been sunk by the floating ice) that the ship had her anchor apeak
before the boat which carried my brother and myself out could reach
it. We barely arrived in time for me to get aboard, the difficulty
of threading our way amongst the masses of ice making our boating
difficult. That my childish faith in Providence was a family trait
might be deduced from the fact that my brother, who had from boyhood
stood to me _in loco parentis_, had not asked me, until I was on the
point of going aboard, what my means of subsistence were, and, when
he found that I had only my six sovereigns, he told me to wait at
Liverpool for a letter of credit he would send me by the steamer which
followed.

That voyage is one of the most delightful memories of my life. I loved
the sea; and every phase of it, storm or calm, was a new joy. I had
one fellow-passenger, a German doctor of philosophy, Dr. Seemann, who
had been an ardent radical in Germany, and had been studying in
the United States the development of political intelligence under
democratic conditions, returning to his native land with the profound
conviction that democratic government was destined to be a failure.
We had hot debates on the subject, in which the doctor adduced his
conversations with the intelligent farmers of New England, whom he had
especially studied, to show that their political education was such
as to endanger the best interests of the community from its extreme
superficiality; I, with an unfaltering faith in the processes of
universal suffrage, disputed his conclusions, so hotly in fact that we
quarreled and he took one side of the quarter-deck for his promenades
and I the other. But the conditions of sea life, with a companionship
limited to two persons, are such that no quarrel that was not mortal,
or from rivalry in the affections of a woman, could endure many days,
and after a few such days we drew to the same side of the deck and
were better friends than before, but we dropped politics.

This was in January of 1850, and I am driven to curiosity as to the
subsequent career of the young German savant, who in that state of
American political evolution was capable of drawing the horoscope of a
nation, as it has been in recent times fulfilled; who saw in the crude
notions of political economy of that prosperous yesterday the germs of
the political blunders and errors of to-day. I drew his portrait, I
made a few studies of sea and sky, but for the most part t