aved, rolling
and labouring, as if her last hour was come, the screw propeller worked
round with a heavy thudding sound, as if some Cyclops were pounding away
under my bunk with a broomstick to rouse me up, my cabin being just over
the screw shaft. It went for awhile "thump:--thump! thump, thump,
thump! Thump:--thump! Thump, thump, thump!" with even regularity; and
then would suddenly break off this movement, whizzing away at a great
rate, as the "send" of the sea lifted the blades out of the water,
buzzing furiously the while like some marine alarum clock running down,
or the mainspring of your watch breaking!

In the morning, however, only the swelling waves--that were rapidly
subsiding--remained to remind us of the gale; and, from that date, we
had fine weather and a good wind "a-beam," until we finally sighted
Sandy Hook lightship at the foot of New York Bay.

We did this in exactly ten days from the time of our "departure point"
being taken, off the Needles.--Rather a fair run on the whole, when you
consider that we lost fully a day by the storm, compelling us as it did,
not only to slacken speed, but also to reverse our course, in order to
keep the vessel's head to the sea, and prevent her being pooped by some
gigantic following wave--as might have been the case if we had kept on
before it, as the unfortunate _London_ did, a short period before.

My first impressions of "the Empire city," as the proud Manhattanese
fondly style it, were, certainly, not favourable; rather the contrary, I
may say at once, without any "beating about the bush."

You see, I landed on a Sunday. It was likewise wet--a nasty, drizzling,
misty morning, fit to give you the blues with its many disagreeables and
make you bless Mackintosh, while cursing Pleiads. Now, either of these
two conditions--I do not refer to the act of benediction or its reverse,
but to the fact of its being Sunday and wet--would have been sufficient
to detract from the attractive merits of any English town; how much
more, therefore, from those possessed by the great cosmopolitan
metropolis of Transatlantica? This city is in bad weather a hundred-
fold more desolate than London, in an aesthetic sense, and that is
saying a good deal; and, on a Sunday, through the absence of any
Sabbatarian influences and the working of teetotal tastes, it is more
outwardly dull and inwardly vicious than any spot north of Tweed--
Glasgow, for example, where the name of the illust