Last But Not Least, I Come To My Excellent Friend Mr. Jones.
It
would be difficult to say whether I was his right-hand man, or he
mine, during the voyage.
Thus at table I carved, while he only
scooped gravy; but at our concerts, of which more anon, he was the
president who called up performers to sing, and I but his messenger
who ran his errands and pleaded privately with the over-modest. I
knew I liked Mr. Jones from the moment I saw him. I thought him by
his face to be Scottish; nor could his accent undeceive me. For as
there is a lingua franca of many tongues on the moles and in the
feluccas of the Mediterranean, so there is a free or common accent
among English-speaking men who follow the sea. They catch a twang
in a New England Port; from a cockney skipper, even a Scotsman
sometimes learns to drop an h; a word of a dialect is picked up
from another band in the forecastle; until often the result is
undecipherable, and you have to ask for the man's place of birth.
So it was with Mr. Jones. I thought him a Scotsman who had been
long to sea; and yet he was from Wales, and had been most of his
life a blacksmith at an inland forge; a few years in America and
half a score of ocean voyages having sufficed to modify his speech
into the common pattern. By his own account he was both strong and
skilful in his trade. A few years back, he had been married and
after a fashion a rich man; now the wife was dead and the money
gone. But his was the nature that looks forward, and goes on from
one year to another and through all the extremities of fortune
undismayed; and if the sky were to fall to-morrow, I should look to
see Jones, the day following, perched on a step-ladder and getting
things to rights. He was always hovering round inventions like a
bee over a flower, and lived in a dream of patents. He had with
him a patent medicine, for instance, the composition of which he
had bought years ago for five dollars from an American pedlar, and
sold the other day for a hundred pounds (I think it was) to an
English apothecary. It was called Golden Oil, cured all maladies
without exception; and I am bound to say that I partook of it
myself with good results. It is a character of the man that he was
not only perpetually dosing himself with Golden Oil, but wherever
there was a head aching or a finger cut, there would be Jones with
his bottle.
If he had one taste more strongly than another, it was to study
character. Many an hour have we two walked upon the deck
dissecting our neighbours in a spirit that was too purely
scientific to be called unkind; whenever a quaint or human trait
slipped out in conversation, you might have seen Jones and me
exchanging glances; and we could hardly go to bed in comfort till
we had exchanged notes and discussed the day's experience. We were
then like a couple of anglers comparing a day's kill. But the fish
we angled for were of a metaphysical species, and we angled as
often as not in one another's baskets. Once, in the midst of a
serious talk, each found there was a scrutinising eye upon himself;
I own I paused in embarrassment at this double detection; but
Jones, with a better civility, broke into a peal of unaffected
laughter, and declared, what was the truth, that there was a pair
of us indeed.
EARLY IMPRESSIONS
We steamed out of the Clyde on Thursday night, and early on the
Friday forenoon we took in our last batch of emigrants at Lough
Foyle, in Ireland, and said farewell to Europe. The company was
now complete, and began to draw together, by inscrutable
magnetisms, upon the decks. There were Scots and Irish in plenty,
a few English, a few Americans, a good handful of Scandinavians, a
German or two, and one Russian; all now belonging for ten days to
one small iron country on the deep.
As I walked the deck and looked round upon my fellow-passengers,
thus curiously assorted from all northern Europe, I began for the
first time to understand the nature of emigration. Day by day
throughout the passage, and thenceforward across all the States,
and on to the shores of the Pacific, this knowledge grew more clear
and melancholy. Emigration, from a word of the most cheerful
import, came to sound most dismally in my ear. There is nothing
more agreeable to picture and nothing more pathetic to behold. The
abstract idea, as conceived at home, is hopeful and adventurous. A
young man, you fancy, scorning restraints and helpers, issues forth
into life, that great battle, to fight for his own hand. The most
pleasant stories of ambition, of difficulties overcome, and of
ultimate success, are but as episodes to this great epic of self-
help. The epic is composed of individual heroisms; it stands to
them as the victorious war which subdued an empire stands to the
personal act of bravery which spiked a single cannon and was
adequately rewarded with a medal. For in emigration the young men
enter direct and by the shipload on their heritage of work; empty
continents swarm, as at the bo's'un's whistle, with industrious
hands, and whole new empires are domesticated to the service of
man.
This is the closet picture, and is found, on trial, to consist
mostly of embellishments. The more I saw of my fellow-passengers,
the less I was tempted to the lyric note. Comparatively few of the
men were below thirty; many were married, and encumbered with
families; not a few were already up in years; and this itself was
out of tune with my imaginations, for the ideal emigrant should
certainly be young.
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