Chapter C: W. Wilmerding (2)

The ferry makes itself felt long before one gets there. There is a sort of undertow in the city tides far up from the river-front. There is a greater tangle of travel as you approach the streets leading to the ferry. There is a perceptible assimilation of trade to the supposed demands of householders living out of town. The retail Mammon dethrones his proud wholesale rival. The sidewalk- or gutter-stand thrusts itself out in advance of the store. The peripatetic dealer in small wares, the newsboy, the apple-woman, the bootblack, and the mendicant marshal you the way. The whole vicinity acquires the look and stir of a bazaar. Baskets and paper parcels and travelling-bags are conspicuous and general. Perhaps you find yourself on the greasy edge of some huge market. The hacks accumulate like croton-bugs about a kitchen sink. You feel as if you were being sucked into some valve or vortex.

There is a test of character in the mode of going to the ferry. It is almost impossible not to be in a hurry, such is the swirl of the tide in which you find yourself. In my three years of almost daily transit I never ceased to revere the moral superiority of the admirable few who day after day could proceed with leisurely step and serene brow amid the heated, breathless, tugging, anxious multitude. It seemed to indicate a steadiness of nerve, a systematic habit, a wise and deliberate forecast, a self-control and self-confidence, and a belief in their watches, to which I never hope to attain this side of Old Charon's ferry itself. And yet somebody is nearly always late. Quite as likely, however, it is somebody who is too early,--because he really belongs to the next boat, and not to the one which is just leaving the dock as he tears into the ferry-house.

There is a good deal of condensed life and human nature to be found at a ferry by one who himself is in no hurry to cross. Take your stand just where you can see up the street and at the same time can command the whole interior. The waiting-room is deserted, except by some such lounger as yourself, or a passenger left by the last boat or "too previous" for the next. Well for you if you are sufficiently respectable to pass muster with the official whose duty it is to see that no one secures a day's lodging for two cents. There is a slow dribble of wayfarers, who seldom spend their time in the dismal and dingy waiting-room unless in very cold weather or to stand guard over their parcels which they have piled upon the seats. But all at once (especially if the next boat is to connect with some train on the other side) you observe a thickening of the living current far up the sidewalk, as when the gutters are swollen by the turning on of a hydrant. Down comes the hurrying mass, fretting at the manifold obstructions, its component parts struggling together and almost seeming to go over each other's heads. No time now for the small courtesies, or even charities, of life. The sturdy and malodorous beggar knows too well to run alongside with his "Help a poor boy; I'm a stranger in the city." And the man whose abridged and distorted legs are his stock in trade waits for the return-tide to enact his shrewd and pantomimic morality-play by a hurried shuffle up and down the pavement. The news-dealers--even the enterprising female who summons mercy to the aid of commerce by her absurdly lugubrious visage--have the paper and the change all ready to thrust into their customer's hand. The scene at the crossing of the street baffles description. Talk of the day of miracles being past! One who can watch this scene of scare and scamper and hair-breadth escape and not believe in a particular Providence must be incorrigibly heterodox.

The tide reaches the outer gate in a state of lively congestion. The person in front of you as you pass the toll-taker's booth is quite sure to have forgotten his ticket, and has to set down his parcels while he fumbles through all his pockets for it. You are sure you hear the inner gate closing. You dash through the ferry-house in the most undignified manner and unphilosophic mood--to find that you have five minutes to spare! And you take your stand beside your double, who has been all this time enjoying the little woes and absurdities of others,--including yourself.

The current has hardly slackened when the long gate begins to roll to. The last passenger has to edge himself through sideways, at some peril of his packages if not of himself, and at the tender mercy of the gate-keeper. Not the last would-be passenger, however; for a frantic form is seen to dart through the narrow and tortuous pass from the street and fling itself upon the closed barrier, appealing in eloquent indignation to the inexorable Cerberus, and then gazing, with face against the lattice, in imbecile despair at the receding boat. Simultaneous with the thud of the shutting gate is the clank of chains and the rattle of clamps and clogs, as of the striking off of fetters and handcuffs, an asthmatic jingle of a bell somewhere in the body of the boat, a slight slush of revolving paddle-wheels, and the great brute, as steady as a spirit-level and as powerful as a battering-ram, separates itself from the dock like the opening blade of a penknife. You recall the good old days when there were no cruelly-humane gates, and when this stage of the proceeding was marked by a wild leap of belated forms across the widening chasm, with now and then the souse of a miscalculating passenger into the yeasty brine. The scene is less picturesque and exciting now, but it is decidedly more satisfactory.

If you have a wise regard for your sanitary well-being, you will remain on deck, alike to saturate your lungs with torrents of oxygen and to let your weary eye and mind disport themselves like sea-gulls on the broad waters of the bay. What so fresh and cool and clean and still and sparkling and in perfect contrast to the stern and stony and resounding streets! As you lean over the taffrail, looking down into the clear, gliding wave, you can readily conceive why the poor unfortunates to whom life has become a stern and stony street are so often tempted to bury their sorrows in that great calm grave.

I never grow tired of watching the wake of the vessel. It revives some of my earliest impressions,--all the more if it be upon the venerable Wiehawken, or James Rumsey, or some other veteran of the Hoboken line, that used to convey me across the Hudson in my childish days. A ferry-boat then meant to me a country boy's visit to the great city, or, a little later, a city boy's holiday-excursion to the Elysian Fields. The long vibrations of the laboring boat bring back the old thrill of excited expectation. Even the discordant clank of the dock-gear is musical in memory's ear. And at any time of life there is a real fascination in watching the smooth and soapy track unrolling behind us, with its sharp division-line in the centre and its upturned depths of glossy green.

Every harbor has its characteristic features. The harbor of New York gives, first of all, the impression of amplitude. This means not only plenty of "elbow-room" upon the water, but of shore-room. The depots of a continent could be conveniently clustered here, and its fleets perform their tactics. There was nothing mean in Nature's mood when she planned the harbor of New York. And, after all that mellow time and consecrating tradition, the traveller's enthusiasm, the poet's fancy, and the painter's sleight have done for the beauties of the Bosphorus, the Bay of Naples, the harbor of Rhodes, and other "fine old ports" and "gems of the first water," I know of few more picturesque effects, whether of color or of grouping, than that which the North-River ferry-boat affords its passengers as midway in the stream they look up the broad palisaded river, or down the islanded bay, or across on either side at populous and steepled shores, on a golden October afternoon or in the breezy light of a winter morning. Here is, at least, none of the monotony of charm, like the stereotyped features of a placid and passionless beauty, which characterizes your standard harbor-scenes. New York may not be as classic or correct as her languishing rivals on the Hellespont or the blue waters of the Mediterranean, but she has the fascination arising from mobility of feature, endless variety of expression, and vivacity of mood. One who daily crosses the North River for a year will have seemed to belt the globe and voyaged through all zones. He will have danced upon the sparkling waves of the AEgean, groped through the fogs of Liverpool, sweltered in the sultry glare of Tunis, skirted the ice-clad shores of Scandinavia, sickened in the surges of the Channel, lain glassed in the watery mirror of the China Sea. And he will have observed striking features peculiar to this latitude of the Atlantic coast. I recall an atmospheric effect in springtime resembling a light pearl-colored mist, which had none of the qualities of a fog, but rather lent a weird transparency to the air. It gave the impression of sunlight faded or washed of its golden particles, or of a picture drawn on pearl. There was a statuesque stillness about the water, a near and yet a far look about the entire scene, which imparted a sense of unreality, almost of the supernatural.

I have spoken of fogs on the river. Their prevalence differs greatly in different years, also their density and darkness. The East River, from its narrowness, its crowded condition, and its rapid current, is far more obstructed by them; but the Bridge has changed all that. The fogs are to be charged to the serious discount of suburban life; still more the snow-storms, which are more deadening to sound and less capable of illumination. But the use of electric light and the vast capacities of the steam-whistle and fog-horn, not to speak of the more than Indian expertness to which a pilot's eye and ear can be trained, have reduced the inconvenience to a minimum. There is, however, to the imaginative traveller a compensating, albeit an awful, charm. It is like exploring some dim and echoing cave resounding with an organ-concert played by Titans on the very instruments of AEolus himself. The whole river makes one think of a vast shell, full of the boomings and sighings of an infinite sea.

But such experiences on the North River are rare, even in times of fog or snow. For the most part the climate of New York harbor is singularly clear, and its autumns are beginning to be recognized as a meteorological masterpiece. And its vast and varied commerce offers exhaustless entertainment for one who has an eye for the picturesque or a sympathetic imagination for the living freight.

As we look up and down the bay we realize how thoroughly steam has cleared the water of sails, sadly to the sacrifice of beauty. Here and there, however, there is a lingering sloop or schooner, engaged in river- or coasting-trade. Decidedly old-fashioned they look, like the white turban and neckerchief of our grandmothers. As they lie off there, nestling so confidingly in the arms of the great river-god, we seem to get a glimpse of a simpler and serener age, when life glided rather than pushed, waited on the heavenly influences and trusted not its own impulse. I know that the life of a deck-hand will not bear a very close examination for aesthetic purposes. But, as I watch these vessels drifting down through the golden afternoon, or cheerily beating up against the tide on a breezy morning, the man at the wheel is a very model of unconscious grace and almost effortless ascendency; and his shipmates, grouped about him like floating lotos-eaters, have ever a touch of the fine old Ulyssean vagrancy. Now and then there stands out before the breeze and the sunlight a great canvassed ship, like some living thing fluttering and glowing and careering under their thrilling touch. And sometimes a fleet of sailing-yachts, more beautiful and swift than sea-gulls, will hover on the horizon.

It is with something of sadness, if not of regret, that we turn our eyes from these lovely and now almost phantom forms to the monstrosities of steam navigation. I think we are passing through a sort of saurian epoch in this age of steam. When we have outgrown this clumsy, noisy, perilous agent, and have adjusted ourselves to electricity or some still more subtile and commodious force, we may be able to restore somewhat of the graces of form and motion. And we shall then look back upon the hideous and awkward craft of this day very much as we now gaze upon a reproduction of the misshapen and unwieldy monsters of the palaeozoic ages. The river swarms with ferry-boats. Was ever utility attained at so great a sacrifice of taste? Their model must have been a toad with a stick thrust through it (three of which, so impaled and hung up in the sun to dry, Luther recommended as the best cure for all manner of "pestilent humors"). At any rate, the difference between their aspect and that of the sail-boat is that of a beetle and a butterfly. The acme of ugliness is reached in the freight ferry-boats, floating fragments of railroad, whose cars look like the joints of a monstrous creeping worm.

No one, however, can complain of any want of variety in these steam-craft, whether in size or in shape, from the rather stately steamships to the little tug-boats that shoot to and fro like gnats upon the surface of a pool. I say _rather_ stately, for the high and graceful hull of the steamer comes to a lame and impotent conclusion in its squat chimney, like a large-faced man with a mayhemed nose, and in its toy masts and rigging, like a stout woman with curl-papers or a thin wisp of ringlet. When two or three of these steamships are together down the harbor, their white volleys of smoke often present quite a lively picture of a naval engagement. The little puffing pilot-boats have a trick of getting in the way of us ferry-voyagers, like fussy custom-house officers among the newly-landed passengers from the ocean-ferries. There is generally a tug, perhaps with a slow convoy, to be waited for or circumnavigated ere the "slip" can be entered. And they run so close in-shore that the pilot has to be wary, and in some cases to emerge with a series of unearthly steam screeches, lest he step upon one of them with his great "horseshoe" of a ferry-boat. The steam-yacht is the most graceful as well as agile of the species, as certainly it ought to be when as much money is sometimes put into one as would buy a Raphael or build a Grecian temple. The steam-yacht has doubtless a thousand comforts for the owner above the sailing-yacht, but we, whose interest in them is an outside and aesthetic one, cannot help saying, "O Utility, what crimes are committed in thy name!"

There is no beauty, but a deal of attraction, in the great flotillas of linked barges and canal-boats which slowly pass like floating and vulgar Venices. If, as is often the case, they lie across the track, we shall have plenty of opportunity to observe at our leisure their still life. I have always thought that canal-life--by reason of its amphibiousness, its phenomenal slowness, its monotony amid endless change, its solitude amid busy and peopled scenes which it is always touching but never entering--must be a unique existence, a _modus vivendi_ quite apart from other human experiences by land or sea. A distinct type of character and of habit cannot fail to be evolved, which it might be well for ingenious novelists at their wits' ends to study, even though it required a trial of patience and a tribulation of stomach and cuticle for a voyage or two. Dickens saw its possibilities, and made it an episode in Little Nell's wanderings, and I am rather surprised that he did not work the vein farther.

The river-barge is freighted for me with pleasant memories. Like Cleopatra's,

From the barge
A strange invisible perfume hits the sense.

There are not many of them now that carry passengers, but in my boyhood they were a common vehicle of travel on the Hudson, several of these shapeless and unwieldy tubs being lashed to the sides or dragged at the stern of a tow-boat. They are identified with summer vacations in the country, than which a boy's memory holds no more honeyed recollections. The hours before "turning in" (the very fact of an abnormal night and bed was a joy to the juvenile mind, despite the incessant and unearthly noises of the live-stock on board) were spent in wandering among the mountains of "produce," inhaling the savor of Orange County butter and baled hay and meal-bags, and listening to the plaintive bleat of comfortless calves and desolate sheep. As night drew on, I would select some snug little nook, where I could lie and dream as we glided along the still and starlit river, through the Highlands, perhaps, or the Palisades. The charm was mainly, of course, in the spell of youthful fancy and expectancy, which touched and transfigured the homely scene, as the moonlight touched and transfigured the silent river. But I associate it all with the barges, and shall ever see in those uncouth craft

Argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales.

In summer the excursion-boats add picturesqueness and a festive air to the river, with their gay bunting and bands of music and salutes with bell or steam-whistle, and, above all, their eager throngs of Sunday-school children or the liberated denizens of foul and narrow streets. At times the shipping along the docks and over the bay will blossom with the flags and streamers of all nations, hung fore and aft and extending in fluttering lines down the rigging, imparting a gala aspect to the scene and perhaps thrilling one with patriotic or historic memories. Perhaps we are crossing at the moment when the great Sound-steamers are pushing out from their piers. We feel quite humiliated on our lonely ferry-boat as these leviathans of nautical architecture sweep past us with an imperious curve far out into the stream, and then move steadily and statelily down the middle of the river, like an "ugly duckling" of mammoth proportions. One never gets over the sensation of that sight, nor its impressions as a type of our century,--a vast floating hotel, carrying the population of a village and the luxurious appointments of a palace, gliding as smoothly and noiselessly as an Indian's canoe, and propelled by an internal force apparently as vital and secret as that which moves the Indian's arm.

Yonder comes an ocean-steamer, long, low, and black, with a tri-color flag at the stern, slowly and puffily tugged by a little pilot-boat. The decks literally swarm with figures in all sorts of outlandish garb,--gray and blue stuffs, long shaggy ulsters, Scotch caps and plaids, gay kerchiefs on the women's heads and necks. Some lounge, smoking or gibbering, over the taffrail, other groups sit picturesquely on their large rude boxes, but most of them are suggestively silent and statuesque. And well they may be, for it is the moment of fate to the poor emigrant as much as for Columbus when he approached the shore of a new world. A new world, indeed, in far more than the geographical sense; a new life, or at least a new attempt to live; old things passed away, and all things to be new--except himself. A great wave of homelessness in the wide world, and perhaps of sickness for the old home, sweeps over the poor exile's heart. All is so strange, and so sternly independent of their forlorn and insignificant selves. Perhaps they are being unladen from the ship, shunted down the gang-plank along with their chests, packed on a transfer-boat like so many imported cattle, only not with the care or tenderness with which a drove of Holsteins or Jerseys would be handled. A squad of emigrants, just landed on the wharf and waiting to be transferred to the emigrant-train for another week's voyage by land to the ends of the continent, is one of the most pathetic sights in this world, especially if they are foreign to our speech and dress and modes of life. How wistful and helpless and strayed they look!--a bit of still and stranded life in the sweep and roar of a world that must seem to them as wild and as soulless as the ocean they have just left. How unconsciously they group themselves in picturesque attitudes, which no artistic eye could improve upon! Their staves, their dangling bundles of coarse canvas or of tied-up handkerchiefs of various colors, their quaint and often grotesque attire, their silent posture and vigilant eyes, their sheep-like dependence on their guides, combined with a watch-dog solicitude for their miserable traps, their household groupings and varied ages, from the baby born on shipboard to the old grandfather come to lay his rheumatic bones in the soil of a strange land,--I have stood and watched it all many and many a time, ere I hurried on to my day's business or to my happy home; and the work has seemed more significant, and the home more sweet, for that sight. Surely one need cut only a little way into life here in order to touch its profoundest mysteries and its most far-reaching suggestions.

One who has known New York for a generation or two cannot fail to be struck with its changed appearance as seen from the ferry-boat. It used to lie as low and flat as a whale's back, with perhaps a harpoon sticking out here and there,--to wit, a steeple. The steam elevator has proved quite an Aladdin's Lamp in its magical feats of architecture, by developing a vertical in place of a lateral growth of buildings. The best building-lots are now in the air, and to be had without ground-rent. Troy had to raise its successive Iliums, Ilioses, and Trojas, at intervals of ages, and tear or burn each one down before erecting the next. But we propose to save the Schliemanns of the future a world of trouble by building our various New Yorks simultaneously, one on top of the other. Accordingly, the city is becoming crowded with towering and clumsy structures, especially on the elevated ridge which runs along Broadway from the City Hall to the Battery, giving it the appearance of an uncouth acropolis. All over the town manufactories and public buildings of colossal size stand, like megatheria, knee-deep in a jungle of houses. The campaniles of modern industry rise slim and tall into the air. The great buttresses and towers of the Brooklyn Bridge loom above the house-tops. Grain-elevators, which "take the wind out of the sails" of Noah's Ark, lie stranded on the docks. The poetic and picturesque "forest of masts" has fallen before the march of progress and the axe of steam almost as thoroughly as the primeval woods. The low and open piers have been enclosed, some of them with considerable architectural effect, giving a trim and bandbox look to the river-side.

The transformation is even more marked on the adjacent shores. As I remember Jersey City and Hoboken in my boyhood, they were only small clusters of buildings, with a ferry-house at the water's edge. Now they have crept along from the Palisades to the Kill van Kull, overflowed the Bergen Hills, reared giant structures which rival New York's in monstrosity, and extended their railroad-wharves and steamship-piers over the Arcadian haunts of the Elysian Fields and the primitive meadows of Communipaw and Paulus Hook. And on the East River Brooklyn, joined to New York by its Siamese ligament of the Bridge, seems the bigger twin of the two. The contrast at night is still more striking. The river and the town are brilliant with electric lights, where formerly twinkling lamps or gas-lights made darkness visible. These have the effect of stars of the first magnitude; and the great Bridge, seen on a dark night from the South Ferry, with its lights at regular intervals, suggests that Orion must have slipped his belt.

Crossing the ferry by night was always a favorite experience with me. In sultry weather one can nearly always get a whiff of freshened air, perhaps from the sea; and the quiet is not less reviving to the heated brain. Nowhere does the night seem more "stilly," or the sense of seclusion more profound, than in the middle of the broad bay on a midsummer night before or after the theatre-goers have crossed. The cities, veiled in moonlight or dim in the star-light, seem to be breathing peacefully in giant slumber. The prosaic features of the scene are hidden, the ragged outlines softened, and the smoke and din indistinguishable. It seems hardly possible that these dream-like masses, with their sparkling lights, like reversed heavens, are the rude, restless, discordant gehennas which they sometimes seem to us by day. And yet I realize the awfulness and vastness of these great living creatures far more than in the belittling and disillusionizing daylight. The anchored or passing vessels only add to the sense of seclusion,--the former with a solitary lantern at the stern, the latter perhaps a galaxy of many-colored lights. On a dark night it has the effect of a discharge of Roman candles arrested in mid-career. The other ferry-boats have a comical appearance as they whirl and whiz past us. If in the daytime they are deplorably like pumpkins with a stick thrust through them, at night they remind us of grotesque lanterns made out of those same pumpkins with illuminated slits and slashes.

I find no small entertainment and suggestion in watching the manoeuvres of the skilful pilots. A novice might hastily conclude that it was a simple matter to steer a boat from one side of the river to another. But let him try, and see where he will bring up. The process is as nice a one and as scientific as a game of billiards. The exact stage of the tide and volume of the current, the velocity and direction of the wind, the ice on the river, the approaching or anchored vessels, and all of them in their mutual relations, have to be calculated with mathematical precision, especially in entering the narrow slip: so that the directest way is often the longest way around. Is there not here an object-lesson for those who would live wisely in this narrow transit which we call life? Keep your eye upon the one point to which you know the higher powers call you; but do not think that you are going to march straight there by force of will, or straight there at all. You are in a world full of cross-purposes and counter-currents and side-winds, of accumulated conservatisms and masses of mere inertia and oppositions which straddle or shoulder themselves across your path. You will probably wreck your undertakings, and will certainly waste your strength in needless collisions and shovings aside, unless you take all these things into account. The capacity to do this is wisdom, as distinct from knowledge or right intentions, in any sphere of life. Herein is practical statesmanship, effective reform, everything which has to do with human wills and the course of this world.

But it is not always practicable, even to the most stalwart and seasoned passenger, to spend his time on the open deck. To stand out on the front (one can hardly call it a prow, where the periphery is that of an average wash-tub) or at the stern is to be drowned by rain or sawn asunder by icy winds or broiled like an oyster, and to cower under the upper deck is to get a lively sense of the Cave of the Winds. One with a healthy sense of smell and an instinct for oxygen may well shrink from entering the cabin, and prefer the perils and discomforts of too much atmosphere to those of a depleted and poisoned one. David may have been wise in choosing to be punished for his sins by pestilence rather than by famine or the sword, but he put it on very doubtful ground when he thought he was thereby falling into "the hand of the Lord" in some special manner. For I am confident that bad air is the devil, and that it is this "power of the air" of which he is "prince." And he has no more impregnable stronghold than the cabin of a ferry-boat in winter. In the cars one can brave public opinion and elude the brakeman's eye so as to open something in his "Black Hole." But the cabin windows are hermetically sealed and the doors jealously guarded by an unsleeping dragon. On some of these boats they have an ingenious method of intensifying the sickening odor by anointing the floors with a rancid oil, which affords the tender stomach all the advantages of the famous crossing of the English Channel.

The entire code of the cabin is still to be rescued from the civilization of the cave-dwellers. The essence of politeness has been shown to be self-sacrifice in small things. The average American is naturally as unselfish a being as dwells upon the planet, but he often appears to disadvantage beside far meaner races by reason of an insane haste which tramples politeness under its feet. "After you, sir,"--a phrase which contains in a nutshell the very kernel of all courtesy,--puts the thing in a shape which is almost a physical impossibility to the American temperament. Our fellow-citizen will go ahead of you with the utmost gallantry, though it be to storm a Malakoff or grapple with a mad dog; but to stand aside and let you get on or off a ferry-boat before him is a strain upon his manners enough to dislocate their every limb. Well, remembering that the passive mood comes after the active in grammatical sequence, we will not despair of a development of the passive virtues even in the "go-ahead" American. And then the law of the cabin will no longer be mob-law, nor its motto, "Every man for himself, and ---- take the ladies."

It is really ridiculous to see the uneasiness and prematureness of most persons as the boat begins to approach the shore. Though conscious that it will not bring the boat and the dock any nearer together, there is a hunger of the eye to seize the latter from afar. Sometimes the movement of an asphyxiated passenger for the door, or the momentary stoppage of the boat in mid-stream, will bring half the cabin to its feet. It is the same impulse which leads passengers, when waiting in the ferry-house, to glue their faces to the gate for five minutes before the boat arrives, which throngs the platforms and aisles of a car long before the depot is entered, which in church varies the closing hymn with an overcoat drill and causes the benediction to be pronounced amid a rattling discharge of hymn-books into the book-racks.

Having entered the cabin, it is always an interesting question on which side we shall sit,--not to say at which end of the boat. I think that temperament has much to do with the decision of these questions. And it might be well for some psychologist and sociologist to investigate why it is that certain persons will instinctively select the rear of the cabin and others advance to the front; also why some will invariably take their seats on the outer and others on the inner side of the cabin. This being with myself not a matter of instinct but of reason, perhaps my experience is of little value, but I freely and confidentially offer it in the interests of science. I choose the inner row of seats for the following reasons: first, they are warmer in winter by reason of the steam-pipes which run underneath them, and cooler in summer by being more directly in the draught from the open doors; secondly, because the boat is steadier there, and one can read one's paper, if so inclined, with less painful adjustment of the eyes to the shaking type; but chiefly because in that position one has before one the panorama of the river, which is the next best thing to being out on deck. One of the mysteries of human nature is that so large a proportion of ferry-passengers appear to take no more notice of the glorious scenes through which they pass twice a day than if it were a tunnel. They will hurry into the cabin in all weathers, seat themselves with their backs to the river, and spend the voyage buried in the newspaper or gazing into vacancy. They do not seem even to appreciate the study of life afforded by their fellow-passengers. I am sure Dickens would have revelled in the opportunity and found no end of Quilps and Chadbands, Swivellers and Turveydrops, Little Nells and Mrs. Nicklebys, Pickwicks and Artful Dodgers. I have found splendid models for almost every type of civilization and not a few types of barbarism. And the eccentricities of dress are hardly less noteworthy.

One learns to enter heartily into the joys and sorrows of the groups, and even of the individuals, whom he thus watches perhaps from day to day. He comes to be a mind-reader, and works out many a little life-story, as did the ingenious Silas Wegg concerning the people who passed his corner or lived in the houses of the neighborhood. Among the more familiar types are college-students cramming for the day's recitation, giggling school-girls, dapper clerks, pert messenger-boys improving the time by reading a blood-and-thunder story-paper in the very smallest of type, business-men, all nerve in the morning, and in the afternoon chatting affably or half asleep, ladies keen for a shopping-"meet" on Fourteenth Street, housewives with market-baskets, and workingmen with tin pails. Each hour of the day develops its own tide and type of travel, beginning with the lowest class of laborer and ending with the belated reveller. There is a still hour in the morning, awhile before noon, when the idlers and the dissipated begin to dribble into or out of the city, and studies of the odd and the sad alike abound for the Hogarthian pencil and imagination.

The "basket brigade" constitutes a large and regular detachment of the trans-Hudson army. Pleasant it is (I can hear the parody-fiend murmur), when things are green and price of meat is low, to move amid the market-scene, where gourmands stout and housewives lean with baskets come and go. Tempting too, alike to the dainty and the thrifty. Like Robinet in the "Evenings at Home," it adds much to the relish of one's little supper to have selected it one's self out of a whole marketful and to inhale its imaginary savors all the way home. Then, it is so nice to surprise the wife with the earliest of the season, or to pour out upon the table a dozen golden oranges, or to bring a little light into the invalid's eye by a basket of grapes or a fragrant bunch of flowers, or to delight Tiny Tim with a trinket, or to let little Jacob "know what oysters is." Especially on Saturday afternoons does the basket brigade come out in force, and many a homely little idyl may be conjured out of the family groups or the purveying parents who throng and cumber the boat at such times. The capacities of the market-basket, as then and there revealed, are prodigious, rivalling those of the trunk of travel; and yet out of the cover will still protrude the legs of unadjustable "broilers" and the green fringes of garden-stuff, and all this not counting in the oyster-pail, or the great watermelon which has to be carried separately by its wooden handle. The epicurean prospect of the Sunday dinner reflected in the restful face as well as materialized in the basket can hardly fail to elicit a gentle thought from the sternest Sabbatarian's heart.

With the excursion-season comes another phase of our little idyllic studies, as we watch the groups and couples intent upon a picnic at the sea-side or among the Jersey villages. Here is a representative family party which I followed with my eyes, and still farther with my imagination, on their way to Coney Island on a fine, fresh summer morning. There was the grandma, a bright-eyed, beaming old lady, beginning to bend somewhat with years, but as pleased with the day's outing as any of them. There was the mother, sharing her responsibility with the neat and pretty young-lady daughter. There was a youth, somewhat of the Abel Garland type, who might have been the young lady's brother, but who was a happy man even if he was not. There was a small boy; and who need be told what a day that was for him? Lastly, there were two charming little ringleted girls, who walked hand in hand in the prettiest way, with eyes that fairly danced and feet that could hardly help doing so. There was no baby to utter a discordant note or to hang as a Damocles' sword of apprehension over the heads of the group. But in so affectionate and well-regulated a family I am not sure that its presence would not have constituted a new source of happiness. And by and by, as the afternoon waned, I could imagine the father meeting them at the beach, with perhaps the real brother (or would it be the real not-brother?), and coming home with them in the cool evening and the sweet moonlight.

On Saturdays there is an earlier current of home-going working-people; and it is easy to detect a quite different air about them from what they wear on other days. There is no shadow of next morning impending over them. One realizes anew the Sabbath as made for man,--the man who works,--and blesses the Son of Man who is "Lord also of the Sabbath." This is the evening when they carry home their reading for the week, as well as their Sunday dinner. I wish more could be said for the general quality, intellectual or moral, of this literature. But most of it is better than mental vacancy, and a great advance on the illiteracy in which these classes were sunk not so very long ago. And it must be borne in mind that the transient and sensational reading which so many of us carry in cars and cabins, or buy at news-stands, or take out of libraries, would misrepresent us if supposed to be all we had or loved to read. There is in more of these homes than perhaps we suspect a shelf with its well-thumbed "Pilgrim's Progress," its "Robinson Crusoe" with one cover gone, its odd volume of Waverley or Dickens, its copy of Burns or Longfellow, its row of school histories and science, and its pile of magazines.

At certain hours, when the trains are due, the basket brigade is reinforced by the carpet-bag battalion; and a crowd of home-coming or out-going travellers is a never-ending source of sympathetic and imaginative study to the leisurely looker-on. What an anachronism that word "carpet-bag" has become, by the way! I saw not long ago on the ferry-boat a genuine and literal specimen, which carried back my thoughts for a generation to the day when bags were really made of carpet and the most fastidious social Bourbon did not disdain to carry them. They flourished in the age of shawls, and came in not long after the epoch of "gum" shoes. They were of every conceivable pattern, from the sober symphony in brown to a gorgeous wealth of color that might vie with the most audacious wall-paper of an aesthetic age. This "belated traveller" of a carpet-bag had all the appearance of a faded and bedraggled gentility,--was, in fact, a veritable tramp among luggage. It sagged down as it stood on the floor. It ran here and there into strings, as of shoes untied and coat fastened together by twine in lieu of buttons. And it was trampy with mouldy discoloration and travel-stains. It was of vast dimensions, and, as was always the way with carpet-bags, bulging in all directions with its contents. I was not surprised to discover, through its orifice, that it had long ceased to be a receptacle for clothing and was filled with honest workman's tools. Burglars, the police-reports tell us, affect the carpet-bag for their jimmies and the like, but in such case it may be depended on to be as reputable in appearance and as close-mouthed as the last defaulting treasurer or trustee. The modern luggage is a type of advanced thought, if not civilization, whether we consider the Saratoga trunk, the Russia-leather satchel, the school-boy's knapsack, or the commercial traveller's double-locked valise. There is "nothing like leather:" men live now in their trunks, and America's proudest contribution to the world is the railway-check.

But my boat bumps on the shore, and I must pass out, to the marching music of the rattling chains and the swashing tide, to my business,--perhaps a "better" one to be "about" than writing these idle observations on a North-River Ferry.

F. N. ZABRISKIE.

THE ART OF READING.

Statistics as to the number of men and women of good standing in the world who cannot read might have a certain interest. There are probably more persons laboring under that disability than is usually supposed, and this with no reference to unfortunates who in early life have missed the opportunity of learning their A B C, but thinking only of those who have never found the way to utilize a knowledge of letters,--of persons, in short, who do not know what to do with a book. Trustworthy statistics, however, would not be easily obtained: there is too strong a prejudice in favor of books for any one to be very forward in confessing a distaste for them. Now and then such an admission is made, but, for the most part, people like to think that under auspicious conditions--if they had time, or quiet, or health, or what not--they should be great readers. It is a point on which it is quite possible to deceive one's self and almost impossible to deceive others.

You are acquainted, perhaps, with some lady on whose table lies the book that every one is talking about: it is not a novel, we will suppose. "Ah, you have that!" you say to her. Yes, and she expects to enjoy it _immensely_. She lifts the cover and casts a caressing glance upon its pages, for all the world as if she could not wait to be at it. You know the feeling, and sympathize with her. The next time you are there, seeing the book again reminds you to ask how she liked it. "Why, positively," she says, "I haven't had _a single minute_ in which I could take it up!" But she still cherishes the same agreeable anticipations as before with regard to it. After a considerable lapse of time, on the occasion of another call you may notice a mark protruding in the region of the first chapter, and if mischief or malice or any other inborn propensity to evil prompts you to allude to the subject once more and inquire if the book pleases her, on the whole, she will probably say that it does _as far as she has read_, only there is an unconscious plaintiveness about this statement which betrays that enthusiasm has waned: the fact is, everybody is talking of another book now, and she has the uncomfortable feeling of being behind-hand. But all the same she may be just as intimately persuaded that it is only a concatenation of adverse circumstances which has prevented her finishing the book long ago, as you are that she will never finish it.

However, as already said, there may sometimes be found among non-readers a clear apprehension of the state of their case. Thus, a lady once avowed, when a conversation had turned upon the profit and pleasure of reading, that she had not the least liking for books and never had had. She regretted it extremely; she felt when she saw any one absorbed in reading that she had missed something; there were times when if she could forget herself in a book she should be very glad, but she could not; she had never been taught to care for reading when she was a child, and it was too late to learn now. Still, on being persuaded to think that she might at least try, she expressed an ambition to enjoy Thackeray, and asked to have his best novel recommended. "Vanity Fair" was accordingly suggested as most likely to please her, and, it being procured, she announced on the following evening that she had read _thirty pages_ that day, and meant to continue at the same rate. Her admiration, alas! was plainly more for her own achievement than for that of her author; nevertheless, the literary adviser talked encouragingly, as the medical adviser often must, in spite of bad signs, and for a few nights the number of pages kept pretty well up to the mark, then steadily declined, and, after an hiatus or two, "Vanity Fair" was mentioned no more. It was, as the lady herself had thought, too late. But on another point also she may have been right,--namely, in the implied belief that childhood was the time when she might have learned to like reading.

There is certainly a wide-spread impression that children ought to display some taste for literature, so that to say a child does not care for his book is rather a damaging statement: it is made with reluctance: one is "_afraid_ Charlie does not like to read;" one always adds, if possible, that "he likes to be read to, however," and in any case the obliging by-stander hastens to say, "Oh, well, perhaps he will take to reading as he grows older," which remark, on the principle that one never knows what may happen, is incontrovertible as far as it goes. No one would wish to assert dogmatically that Charlie will not ripen into a reader, but at the same time no one very seriously supposes that he will. "As the twig is bent the tree's inclined" is felt to be peculiarly applicable in his case.

And still one ought not to be fatalistic about the twig: for the tree, indeed, it is too late, but that means nothing, if not that for the twig it is yet time. In certain ways this idea is recognized and acted upon, as, for instance, when a taste for music is to be cultivated children are held to practise daily on the piano, even though they hate it; if dancing is necessary to secure a graceful carriage, they must learn to dance, notwithstanding that they might prefer to swarm up and down the sidewalk on roller-skates. And so, when a relish for books is to be awakened, why should it not follow that children must read? Why content one's self with anything short of that? To read to a child, otherwise than occasionally and with the occult purpose of giving a lesson in ease of utterance, is evidently pernicious. It may sound well to say that Charlie likes to be read to, but the real sense of the statement is that he considers reading laborious, and that we are doing our best to strengthen him in that opinion. To be sure he is right,--reading _is_ more or less laborious at the outset; but then the obvious deduction from this would seem to be that the more seriously he applies himself to it the better.

To some persons such an axiom will have a brain-feverish sound: children are heard of who are devoted to books to the injury of their health, and so it is assumed that to incite any child to read may be a tempting of Providence. This is a groundless supposition. Even in the few authentic cases of precocious development efficient parents may easily take measures to check the ravages of intellect, while in the far greater number of instances where the mental and physical qualities are pretty evenly balanced, parental efficiency would be well displayed in cherishing rather than in repressing a love for literature. If one thinks what a companion a book may be in hours of loneliness, what a comforter in weary illness or in sorrow, and, above all, what a blessing in the temporary escape it offers from the every-day trials of existence, which tend to take on huge proportions if one settles down among them, but will look of a very reasonable size to one who comes back to them with sight refreshed after a judicious absence,--if one thinks of all this, the art of playing on the piano or of dancing sinks greatly in importance as compared with the art of reading. Even considering only the respective duration of advantage, one would have to decide for reading if a choice must be made, for girls generally give up music when they marry, and at some not quite so definitely fixed period dancing is renounced by both sexes, while books remain appropriate to every age and condition of life.

Happily, however, there is no need to choose: reading may be cultivated side by side with more florid accomplishments. To provide an interesting book and appoint an hour for its perusal may just as easily be done as to set apart an hour for the piano,--indeed, in some cases more easily, since there would be no bills coming in for the reading-lessons. And who will say that a child might not learn to like reading, might not insensibly get into the spirit of the art, by this simple method when duly insisted on? Perhaps it would fail sometimes; there may be persons absolutely incapable of the prolonged attention required for reading; but one cannot help thinking that in most minds this power of attention could be aroused and fostered, and that, therefore, if a child does not like books at the start, that need not be accounted a fatal sign. People who have detested their music-lessons at first have been known to come finally to the enjoyment of music through those very means.

When children should begin to read, and how they should learn, are questions which lie rather outside the scope of this paper and concern those who "take to reading" as well as those who "like to be read to;" but, stating the case broadly, one might say that they can begin at any time and learn anyhow. It has been seriously advocated that children be not taught to read until they are ten years old; and certainly it would be quite possible to prevent their reading before then. On the other hand, as an actual fact, they do read at seven and eight years of age, and used to read at five or even earlier. Regarded by the light of modern theory, what they used to do was, of course, deplorable; still, the fact remains, and is mitigated by circumstances, for the children were not considered prodigies at that time, and a due proportion of them lived to grow up, and may be seen to-day, as men and women, walking about the world in tolerable health and spirits.

With respect to methods of learning to read, the difference must appear even greater to one who has ever seen or who dimly remembers an old-fashioned _primer_. There was the alphabet to begin with, then some syllables and little words neatly arranged in columns, and directly upon that the reading-lesson, introduced, it may be, by the picture of a child in long pantalettes contemplating a shrub which, figuratively speaking, lent color to a few conventional remarks upon the rose,--as that it is red and smells sweet. Such was the whole system. We are aware now that to storm the citadel of letters in that fashion was absurd; that, on the contrary, it should be scientifically approached in the taking of outworks; and nevertheless here also is the fact to be reckoned with that children did learn by the old system, and that they learned with what looks in these days like marvellous celerity is a mitigating circumstance which has even yet a certain charm for some minds. There was a precision, too, about acquirements under the ancient method which is not always found under the new. At present the very mother of a child of eight years may not be quite clear as to her daughter's attainments; she _can_ read, but still, "you know, they teach them now to write first," and it appears eventually that Nellie writes so well and reads so ill as to be obliged to copy off her lessons for the advantage of learning them from her own handwriting.