emember right, from trough to crest.
One realizes thoroughly the _abysmal_ character of the turbulent chaos,
and there is a sensation of infiniteness around and below you not devoid
of grandeur; but as an exhibition of the puissance of angry water, I do
not think the mid-ocean tempest equal to the storm which brings the
thunder of the surf full on the granite bulwarks of Western Ireland.

It must be owned, that the conversational powers of our small society
were limited. Very often some selfishness mingled with my sincere
compassion for the prostrated sufferings of my Philadelphian friend of
the tug-boat; for whenever his weary aching head would allow of the
exertion, he could talk on almost any subject, fluently and well. He was
returning from a long visit to Paris, and a rapid tour through Germany
and Southern Europe. Most of the countries, that he had been compelled
to hurry over, I had loitered through in days past, and I ought to have
been shamed by the contrast in our recollections--his, so clear and
systematical--mine, so vague and dim. An intellectual American
travelling through strange lands does certainly look at nature, animate
and inanimate, after a practical business-like fashion peculiar to his
race; but it would be unfair to infer that such minds are, necessarily,
unappreciative. At all events, that concentrative, synthetical power,
that takes in surrounding objects at a single glance, and retains them
in a tolerably distinct classification, is rather enviable, even as a
mental accomplishment.

We did not speak much about the troubles beyond sea, and the
Philadelphian was rather reserved as to his proclivities. My impression
is, that his sympathy tended rather southward (all his early life had
been spent in Alabama), but he declined to commit himself much, nor do I
believe that he was a violent partisan either way. On one point he was
very decided: Falkland himself could not have wished more devoutly for
the termination of a fatal civil war--fatal, he said, to the interests,
present and future, of both the combatant powers--ruinous to every
class, with two exceptions; the adventurers who, having little to lose,
gained, by joining the ranks of either army, a social position to which
they could not otherwise have aspired; and the speculators, who,
directly or indirectly, fairly or unfairly, made gains vast and unholy,
such as wreckers are wont to gather in time of tempest and general
disaster. He scarcely