let slip the talisman only for a
moment, what terrible advantage it will take of you! and you will
confess that steam has some claims both to the beautiful and the
terrible! For our own part, when we are down among the machinery of a
steamboat in full play, we conduct ourselves very reverently, for we
consider it as a very serious neighborhood, and every time the steam
whizzes with such red-hot determination from the escape-valve, we start
as if some of the spirits were after us. But in a canal-boat there is no
power, no mystery, no danger; one cannot blow up, one cannot be
drowned--unless by some special effort; one sees clearly all there is in
the case--a horse, a rope, and a muddy strip of water--and that is all.

Did you ever try it, reader? If not, take an imaginary trip with us,
just for experiment. "There's the boat!" exclaims a passenger in the
omnibus, as we are rolling down from the Pittsburg Mansion House to the
canal. "Where?" exclaim a dozen of voices, and forthwith a dozen heads
go out of the window. "Why, down there, under that bridge; don't you see
those lights?" "What, that little thing!" exclaims an inexperienced
traveller; "dear me! we can't half of us get into it!" "We! indeed,"
says some old hand in the business; "I think you'll find it will hold us
and a dozen more loads like us." "Impossible!" say some. "You'll see,"
say the initiated; and as soon as you get out you _do_ see, and hear,
too, what seems like a general breaking loose from the Tower of Babel,
amid a perfect hail-storm of trunks, boxes, valises, carpet-bags, and
every describable and indescribable form of what a Westerner calls
"plunder."

"That's my trunk!" barks out a big, round man. "That's my bandbox!"
screams a heart-stricken old lady, in terror for her immaculate Sunday
caps. "Where's my little red box? I had two carpet-bags and a--My trunk
had a scarle--Halloo! where are you going with that portmanteau?
Husband! Husband! do see after the large basket and the little
hair-trunk--Oh, and the baby's little chair!" "Go below, go below, for
mercy's sake, my dear; I'll see to the baggage." At last the feminine
part of creation, perceiving that, in this particular instance, they
gain nothing by public speaking, are content to be led quietly under
hatches; and amusing is the look of dismay which each new-comer gives to
the confined quarters that present themselves. Those who were so
ignorant of the power of compression as to suppose th