y more satisfactory.

If you have a wise regard for your sanitary well-being, you will remain
on deck, alike to saturate your lungs with torrents of oxygen and to let
your weary eye and mind disport themselves like sea-gulls on the broad
waters of the bay. What so fresh and cool and clean and still and
sparkling and in perfect contrast to the stern and stony and resounding
streets! As you lean over the taffrail, looking down into the clear,
gliding wave, you can readily conceive why the poor unfortunates to whom
life has become a stern and stony street are so often tempted to bury
their sorrows in that great calm grave.

I never grow tired of watching the wake of the vessel. It revives some
of my earliest impressions,--all the more if it be upon the venerable
Wiehawken, or James Rumsey, or some other veteran of the Hoboken line,
that used to convey me across the Hudson in my childish days. A
ferry-boat then meant to me a country boy's visit to the great city, or,
a little later, a city boy's holiday-excursion to the Elysian Fields.
The long vibrations of the laboring boat bring back the old thrill of
excited expectation. Even the discordant clank of the dock-gear is
musical in memory's ear. And at any time of life there is a real
fascination in watching the smooth and soapy track unrolling behind us,
with its sharp division-line in the centre and its upturned depths of
glossy green.

Every harbor has its characteristic features. The harbor of New York
gives, first of all, the impression of amplitude. This means not only
plenty of "elbow-room" upon the water, but of shore-room. The depots of
a continent could be conveniently clustered here, and its fleets perform
their tactics. There was nothing mean in Nature's mood when she planned
the harbor of New York. And, after all that mellow time and
consecrating tradition, the traveller's enthusiasm, the poet's fancy,
and the painter's sleight have done for the beauties of the Bosphorus,
the Bay of Naples, the harbor of Rhodes, and other "fine old ports" and
"gems of the first water," I know of few more picturesque effects,
whether of color or of grouping, than that which the North-River
ferry-boat affords its passengers as midway in the stream they look up
the broad palisaded river, or down the islanded bay, or across on either
side at populous and steepled shores, on a golden October afternoon or
in the breezy light of a winter morning. Here is, at least, none of the
monot