e boat scarce large
enough to contain them and theirs, find, with dismay, a respectable
colony of old ladies, babies, mothers, big baskets, and carpet-bags
already established. "Mercy on us!" says one, after surveying the little
room, about ten feet long and six feet high, "where are we all to sleep
to-night?" "Oh, me, what a sight of children!" says a young lady, in a
despairing tone. "Pooh!" says an initiated traveller, "children! scarce
any here; let's see: one; the woman in the corner, two; that child with
the bread and butter, three; and then there's that other woman with two.
Really, it's quite moderate for a canal-boat. However, we can't tell
till they have all come."

"All! for mercy's sake, you don't say there are any more coming!"
exclaim two or three in a breath; "they _can't_ come; _there is not
room_!"

Notwithstanding the impressive utterance of this sentence the contrary
is immediately demonstrated by the appearance of a very corpulent
elderly lady with three well-grown daughters, who come down looking
about them most complacently, entirely regardless of the unchristian
looks of the company. What a mercy it is that fat people are always
good-natured!

After this follows an indiscriminate raining down of all shapes, sizes,
sexes, and ages--men, women, children, babies, and nurses. The state of
feeling becomes perfectly desperate. Darkness gathers on all faces. "We
shall be smothered! we shall be crowded to death! we _can't stay_ here!"
are heard faintly from one and another; and yet, though the boat grows
no wider, the walls no higher, they do live, and do stay there, in spite
of repeated protestations to the contrary. Truly, as Sam Slick says,
"there's a _sight of wear_ in human natur'!"

But meanwhile the children grow sleepy, and divers interesting little
duets and trios arise from one part or another of the cabin.

"Hush, Johnny! be a good boy," says a pale, nursing mamma, to a great,
bristling, white-headed phenomenon, who is kicking very much at large in
her lap.

"I won't be a good boy, neither," responds Johnny, with interesting
explicitness; "I want to go to bed, and so-o-o-o!" and Johnny makes up a
mouth as big as a tea-cup, and roars with good courage, and his mamma
asks him "if he ever saw pa do so," and tells him that "he is mamma's
dear, good little boy, and must not make a noise," with various
observations of the kind, which are so strikingly efficacious in such
cases. Meanwhile the