where the savage girls plait flowers, and the
savage boys carve cocoa-nut shells, and the grim
blind idols muse in their shady groves to
exactly the same purpose as the priests and
chiefs. And possibly the parrots don't know,
possibly they do, that the noble savage is a
wearisome impostor wherever he is, and has five
hundred thousand volumes of indifferent rhyme,
and no reason, to answer for.

Shadwell church! Pleasant whispers of there
being a fresher air down the river than down by
the Docks, go pursuing one another, playfully,
in and out of the openings in its spire. Gigantic
in the basin just beyond the church, looms my
Emigrant Ship: her name, the Amazon. Her
figure-head is not disfigured as those beauteous
founders of the race of strong-minded women
arc fabled to have been, for the convenience of
drawing the bow; but I sympathise with the
carver:

A flattering carver who made it his care
To carve busts as they ought to be— not as they were.

My Emigrant Ship lies broadside-on to the wharf.
Two great gangways made of spars and planks
connect her with the wharf; and up and down
these gangways, perpetually crowding to and
fro and in and out, like ants, are the Emigrants
who are going to sail in my Emigrant Ship.
Some with cabbages, some with loaves of
bread, some with cheese and butter, some with
milk and beer, some with boxes beds and
bundles, some with babies—nearly all with
children—nearly all with bran-new tin cans for their
daily allowance of water, uncomfortably
suggestive of a tin flavour in the drink. To and fro,
up and down, aboard and ashore, swarming
here and there and everywhere, my Emigrants.
And still as the Dock-Gate swings upon its
hinges, cabs appear, and carts appear, and vans
appear, bringing more of my Emigrants, with
more cabbages, more loaves, more cheese and
butter, more milk and beer, more boxes beds
and bundles, more tin cans, and on those shipping
investments accumulated compound interest
of children.

I go aboard my Emigrant Ship. I go first to
the great cabin, and find it in the usual condition
of a Cabin at that pass. Perspiring landsmen,
with loose papers, and with pens and
inkstands, pervade it; and the general appearance of
things is as if the late Mr. Amazon's funeral had
just come home from the cemetery, and the
disconsolate Mrs. Amazon's trustees found the
affairs in great disorder, and were looking high
and low for the will. I go out on the poop-deck,
for air, and surveying the emigrants on the deck
below (indeed they are crowded all about me,
up there too), find more pens and inkstands in
action, and more papers, and interminable
complication respecting accounts with individuals for
tin cans and what not. But nobody is in an ill
temper, nobody is the worse for drink, nobody
swears an oath or uses a coarse word, nobody
appears depressed, nobody is weeping, and down
upon the deck in every corner where it is
possible to find a few spare feet to kneel, crouch,
or lie in, people, in every unsuitable attitude
for writing, are writing letters.

Now, I have seen emigrant ships before this
day in June. And these people are so strikingly
different from all other people in like
circumstances whom I have ever seen, that I wonder
aloud, "What would a stranger suppose these
emigrants to be!"

The vigilant bright face of the weather-
browned captain of the Amazon is at my shoulder,
and he says, "What, indeed! The most of
these came aboard yesterday evening. They came
from various parts of England in small parties
that had never seen one another before. Yet they
had not been a couple of hours on board, when
they established their own police, made their own
regulations, and set their own watches at all the
hatchways. Before nine o'clock the ship was as
orderly and as quiet as a man-of-war."

I looked about me again, and saw the
letter-writing going on with the most curious
composure. Perfectly abstracted in the midst of the
crowd; while great casks were swinging aloft,
and being lowered into the hold; while hot
agents were hurrying up and down, adjusting
the interminable accidents; while two hundred
strangers were searching everywhere for two
hundred other strangers, and were asking
questions about them of two hundred more; while the
children played up and down all the steps, and
in and out among all the people's legs, and were
beheld, to the general dismay, toppling over all
the dangerous places; the letter-writers wrote
on calmly. On the starboard side of the ship,
a grizzled man dictated a long letter to
another grizzled man in an immense fur cap:
which letter was of so profound a quality, that it
became necessary for the amanuensis at intervals
to take off his fur cap in both his hands, for the
ventilation of his brain, and stare at him who
dictated, as a man of many mysteries who was
worth looking at. On the larboard side, a
woman had covered a belaying-pin with a
white cloth, to make a neat desk of it, and was
sitting on a little box, writing with the deliberation
of a bookkeeper. Down upon her breast
on the planks of the deck at this woman's feet,
with her head diving in under a beam of the
bulwarks on that side, as an eligible place of
refuge for her sheet of paper, a neat and pretty
girl wrote for a good hour (she fainted at last),
only rising to the surface occasionally for a dip
of ink. Alongside the boat, close to me on the
poop-deck, another girl, a fresh well-grown
country girl, was writing another letter on the
bare deck. Later in the day, when this self-same
boat was filled with a choir who sang glees
and catches for a long time, one of the singers,
a girl, sang her part mechanically all the while,
and wrote a letter in the bottom of the boat
while doing so.

"A stranger would be puzzled to guess the
right name for these people, Mr. Uncommercial,"
says the captain.

"Indeed he would."

"If you hadn't known, could you ever have
supposed——?"