To meet him, crowing with laughter and
beating an accompaniment to his own mirth with a tin spoon upon a tin
cup, was to meet a little triumph of the human species. Even when
his mother and the rest of his family lay sick and prostrate around
him, he sat upright in their midst and sang aloud in the pleasant
heartlessness of infancy.
Throughout the Friday, intimacy among us men made but a few advances.
We discussed the probable duration of the voyage, we exchanged pieces
of information, naming our trades, what we hoped to find in the new
world, or what we were fleeing from in the old; and, above all, we
condoled together over the food and the vileness of the steerage.
One or two had been so near famine that you may say they had run into
the ship with the devil at their heels; and to these all seemed for
the best in the best of possible steamers. But the majority were
hugely contented. Coming as they did from a country in so low a
state as Great Britain, many of them from Glasgow, which commercially
speaking was as good as dead, and many having long been out of work,
I was surprised to find them so dainty in their notions.
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