I
personally had learned, among other things, that the Atlantic
Ocean, considered as such, is a considerably overrated body.
Having been across it, even on so big and fine and well-ordered a
ship as this ship was, the ocean, it seemed to me, was not at all
what it had been cracked up to be.
During the first day out it is a novelty and after that a
monotony - except when it is rough; and then it is a doggoned
nuisance. Poets without end have written of the sea, but I take
it they stayed at home to do their writing. They were not on the
bounding billow when they praised it; if they had been they might
have decorated the billow, but they would never have praised it.
As the old song so happily put it: My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean!
And a lot of others have lied over it too; but I will not - at least
not just yet. Perhaps later on I may feel moved to do so; but at
this moment I am but newly landed from it and my heart is full of
rankling resentment toward the ocean and all its works.
I speak but a sober conviction when I say that the chief advantage
to be derived from taking an ocean voyage is not that you took it,
but that you have it to talk about afterward. And, to my mind,
the most inspiring sight to bewitnessed on a trip across the
Atlantic is the Battery - viewed from the ocean side, coming back.
Do I hear any seconds to that motion?
Chapter III
Bathing Oneself on the Other Side
My first experience with the bathing habits of the native Aryan
stocks of Europe came to pass on the morning after the night of
our arrival in London.
London disappointed me in one regard - when I opened my eyes that
morning there was no fog. There was not the slightest sign of a
fog. I had expected that my room would be full of fog of about
the consistency of Scotch stage dialect - soupy, you know, and thick
and bewildering. I had expected that servants with lighted tapers
in their hands would be groping their way through corridors like
caves, and that from the street without, would come the hoarse-voiced
cries of cabmen lost in the enshrouding gray. You remember Dickens
always had them hoarse-voiced.
This was what I confidently expected. Such, however, was not to
be. I woke to a consciousness that the place was flooded with
indubitable and undoubted sunshine. To be sure, it was not the
sharp, hard sunshine we have in America, which scours and bleaches
all it touches, until the whole world has the look of having just
been clear-starched and hot-ironed. It was a softened, smoke-edged,
pastel-shaded sunshine; nevertheless it was plainly recognizable
as the genuine article.
