As Usual On A Steamboat, No One Is
Certain About The Names, And The Little Geographical Knowledge We
Have Is Soon Hopelessly Confused.
We make out South Boston very
plainly:
A tourist is looking at its warehouses through his
opera-glass, and telling his boy about a recent fire there. We find out
afterwards that it was East Boston. We pass to the stern of the boat
for a last look at Boston itself; and while there we have the
pleasure of showing inquirers the Monument and the State House. We
do this with easy familiarity; but where there are so many tall
factory chimneys, it is not so easy to point out the Monument as one
may think.
The day is simply delicious, when we get away from the unozoned air
of the land. The sky is cloudless, and the water sparkles like the
top of a glass of champagne. We intend by and by to sit down and
look at it for half a day, basking in the sunshine and pleasing
ourselves with the shifting and dancing of the waves. Now we are
busy running about from side to side to see the islands, Governor's,
Castle, Long, Deer, and the others. When, at length, we find Fort
Warren, it is not nearly so grim and gloomy as we had expected, and
is rather a pleasure-place than a prison in appearance. We are
conscious, however, of a patriotic emotion as we pass its green turf
and peeping guns. Leaving on our right Lovell's Island and the Great
and Outer Brewster, we stand away north along the jagged
Massachusetts shore. These outer islands look cold and wind-swept
even in summer, and have a hardness of outline which is very far from
the aspect of summer isles in summer seas. They are too low and bare
for beauty, and all the coast is of the most retiring and humble
description. Nature makes some compensation for this lowness by an
eccentricity of indentation which looks very picturesque on the map,
and sometimes striking, as where Lynn stretches out a slender arm
with knobby Nahant at the end, like a New Zealand war club. We sit
and watch this shore as we glide by with a placid delight. Its
curves and low promontories are getting to be speckled with villages
and dwellings, like the shores of the Bay of Naples; we see the white
spires, the summer cottages of wealth, the brown farmhouses with an
occasional orchard, the gleam of a white beach, and now and then the
flag of some many-piazzaed hotel. The sunlight is the glory of it
all; it must have quite another attraction - that of melancholy - under
a gray sky and with a lead-colored water foreground.
There was not much on the steamboat to distract our attention from
the study of physical geography. All the fashionable travelers had
gone on the previous boat or were waiting for the next one. The
passengers were mostly people who belonged in the Provinces and had
the listless provincial air, with a Boston commercial traveler or
two, and a few gentlemen from the republic of Ireland, dressed in
their uncomfortable Sunday clothes.
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