It Is Said That, When This
Poor Man Returns From A Voyage, He Spends One Whole Day In The Tomb,
Lamenting His Bereavement.
There is a superb monument, erected by a fireman's company to the memory
of one of their brethren, who lost his life while nobly rescuing an infant
from a burning dwelling.
His statue is on the top, with an infant in his
arms, and the implements of his profession lie below. But by far the most
extraordinary, and certainly one of the lions of New York, is to a young
lady who was killed in coming home from a ball. The carriage-horses ran
away, she jumped out, and was crushed under the wheels. She stands under a
marble canopy supported by angels, and is represented in her ball-dress,
with a mantle thrown over it. This monument has numerous pillars and
representations of celestial beings, and is said to have cost about
6000l. Several of the marble mausoleums cost from 4000l. to 5000l.
Yet all the powerful, the wealthy, and the poor have descended to the dust
from whence they sprung; and here, as everywhere else, nothing can
disguise the fact that man, the feeble sport of passion and infirmity, can
only claim for his inheritance at last the gloom of a silent grave, where
he must sleep with the dust of his fathers. I observed only one verse of
Scripture on a tombstone, and it contained the appropriate prayer, "So
teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom."
Having seen the emigrants bid adieu to the Old World, in the flurry of
grief, hope, and excitement, I was curious to see what difference a five-
weeks' voyage would have produced in them, and in what condition they
would land upon the shores of America. In a city where emigrants land at
the rate of a thousand a-day, I was not long of finding an opportunity. I
witnessed the debarkation upon the shore of the New World of between 600
and 700 English emigrants, who had just arrived from Liverpool. If they
looked tearful, flurried, and anxious when they left Liverpool, they
looked tearful, pallid, dirty, and squalid when they reached New York. The
necessary discomforts which such a number of persons must experience when
huddled together in a close, damp, and ill-ventilated steerage, with very
little change of clothing, and an allowance of water insufficient for the
purposes of cleanliness, had been increased in this instance by the
presence of cholera on board of the ship.
The wharfs at New York are necessarily dirty, and are a scene of
indescribable bustle from morning to night, with ships arriving and
sailing, ships loading and unloading, and emigrants pouring into the town
in an almost incessant stream. They look as if no existing power could
bring order out of such a chaos. In this crowd, on the shores of a strange
land, the emigrants found themselves. Many were deplorably emaciated,
others looked vacant and stupified.
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