umns are beginning to be recognized as a
meteorological masterpiece. And its vast and varied commerce offers
exhaustless entertainment for one who has an eye for the picturesque or
a sympathetic imagination for the living freight.

As we look up and down the bay we realize how thoroughly steam has
cleared the water of sails, sadly to the sacrifice of beauty. Here and
there, however, there is a lingering sloop or schooner, engaged in
river- or coasting-trade. Decidedly old-fashioned they look, like the
white turban and neckerchief of our grandmothers. As they lie off there,
nestling so confidingly in the arms of the great river-god, we seem to
get a glimpse of a simpler and serener age, when life glided rather than
pushed, waited on the heavenly influences and trusted not its own
impulse. I know that the life of a deck-hand will not bear a very close
examination for aesthetic purposes. But, as I watch these vessels
drifting down through the golden afternoon, or cheerily beating up
against the tide on a breezy morning, the man at the wheel is a very
model of unconscious grace and almost effortless ascendency; and his
shipmates, grouped about him like floating lotos-eaters, have ever a
touch of the fine old Ulyssean vagrancy. Now and then there stands out
before the breeze and the sunlight a great canvassed ship, like some
living thing fluttering and glowing and careering under their thrilling
touch. And sometimes a fleet of sailing-yachts, more beautiful and swift
than sea-gulls, will hover on the horizon.

It is with something of sadness, if not of regret, that we turn our eyes
from these lovely and now almost phantom forms to the monstrosities of
steam navigation. I think we are passing through a sort of saurian epoch
in this age of steam. When we have outgrown this clumsy, noisy, perilous
agent, and have adjusted ourselves to electricity or some still more
subtile and commodious force, we may be able to restore somewhat of the
graces of form and motion. And we shall then look back upon the hideous
and awkward craft of this day very much as we now gaze upon a
reproduction of the misshapen and unwieldy monsters of the palaeozoic
ages. The river swarms with ferry-boats. Was ever utility attained at so
great a sacrifice of taste? Their model must have been a toad with a
stick thrust through it (three of which, so impaled and hung up in the
sun to dry, Luther recommended as the best cure for all manner of
"pestilent humors