aft puffed and
snorted furiously, but failed to persuade any one that she was doing
eight miles an hour; the grime of many years lay thick on her dusky
timbers--dust under cover, and mud where the wet swept in, and her
close, dark cabins were stifling enough to make you, after five minutes
of vapor-bathing, plunge eagerly into the bitter weather outside.
Indeed, there was not much to see, for the track lies on the inner and
uglier side of Staten Island. The last few miles lead through marshes,
with nothing taller growing than reeds and osiers.

For an hour or so after leaving Amboy, you look out on a country thickly
populated, well cultivated, and trimly fenced, bearing a strong
resemblance to parts of our own eastern counties. We passed through one
wood, in height of trees, sweep of ground, color of soil, and build of
boundary-fence, so exactly like a certain cover in Norfolk similarly
bisected by the rail, that I could have picked out the precise spot
where, many a time and oft, I have waited for the "rocketers." But the
character of the landscape soon changed; loose, sprawling "zigzags"
usurped the place of neat squared posts and rails; the stunted woodland
stretched farther afield, with rarer breaks of clearing; and the low
hill-ranges, behind which the watery sun soon absconded, looked drearily
bare in the distance.

It was pleasant, from the ferry boat, which was our last change, to meet
the lights of Philadelphia, gleaming out on the broad dark Susquehanna.

I can say little of that staid, opulent, intensely respectable city--not
even if the imputation of dullness, cast upon her by the more mercurial
South, be a slander; for the few hours of my stay there were spent
almost entirely with my Asiatic friend, whose invitations and
inducements to a longer sojourn were very hard to resist. But I was
impatient to get on (as men will be who cannot see their arm's-length
into the future), and at midnight I started again for Washington.

My recollections of that journey are the reverse of roseate. The
atmosphere of the cars--windows hermetic, and stoves red-hot--made one
look back regretfully on the milder _inferno_ of the passage-boat; the
acrid apple-odor was more pungently nauseating; and the abomination of
expectoration less carefully dissembled. Besides this, I was afflicted
by another nuisance, purely private and personal.

Whether there be any such thing as love at first sight or no, is a
question--grave or gay