riages, more
pyramids of travelling trunks, and valets and couriers bustling and
swearing round about them. And already, and in various corners and
niches, lying on coils of rope, black tar-cloths, ragged cloaks, or hay,
you see a score of those dubious fore-cabin passengers, who are never
shaved, who always look unhappy, and appear getting ready to be sick.

At one, dinner begins in the after-cabin--boiled salmon, boiled beef,
boiled mutton, boiled cabbage, boiled potatoes, and parboiled wine for
any gentlemen who like it, and two roast-ducks between seventy. After
this, knobs of cheese are handed round on a plate, and there is a talk
of a tart somewhere at some end of the table. All this I saw peeping
through a sort of meat-safe which ventilates the top of the cabin, and
very happy and hot did the people seem below.

"How the deuce CAN people dine at such an hour?" say several genteel
fellows who are watching the manoeuvres. "I can't touch a morsel before
seven."

But somehow at half-past three o'clock we had dropped a long way down
the river. The air was delightfully fresh, the sky of a faultless
cobalt, the river shining and flashing like quicksilver, and at this
period steward runs against me bearing two great smoking dishes covered
by two great glistening hemispheres of tin. "Fellow," says I, "what's
that?"

He lifted up the cover: it was ducks and green pease, by jingo!

"What! haven't they done YET, the greedy creatures?" I asked. "Have the
people been feeding for three hours?"

"Law bless you, sir, it's the second dinner. Make haste, or you won't
get a place." At which words a genteel party, with whom I had been
conversing, instantly tumbled down the hatchway, and I find myself one
of the second relay of seventy who are attacking the boiled salmon,
boiled beef, boiled cabbage, &c. As for the ducks, I certainly had
some pease, very fine yellow stiff pease, that ought to have been
split before they were boiled; but, with regard to the ducks, I saw the
animals gobbled up before my eyes by an old widow lady and her party
just as I was shrieking to the steward to bring a knife and fork to
carve them. The fellow! (I mean the widow lady's whiskered companion)--I
saw him eat pease with the very knife with which he had dissected the
duck!

After dinner (as I need not tell the keen observer of human nature who
peruses this) the human mind, if the body be in a decent state, expands
into gayety and benevolence, an