138 THE STEAMEtt. 



lark " was a liberal tea and supper, and of course as there 

 was a very large number of people on board, I prepared 

 myself to observe if the belief of my friends in England 

 was correct, as to the rush of rude and hungry people to 

 the chairs at the table, and as to their seizure and 

 manual demolition of any dishes that were near them. 

 Gruess my astonishment, then, when I saw no rush, no 

 undue haste, but the whole company take their places in 

 the most orderly manner, and what was excessively to 

 my delight and comfort, no man spit while sitting at 

 the table and wherefore ? Why, simply because the 

 American nation must ( take the quid of the United 

 States out of their mouth while they adopt the action of 

 mastication ; the quid being usually so immense, a 

 man could not eat with it in his mouth. Not only was 

 there no rudeness and disorder, but everybody who sat 

 near me, of whatever class, for we were all mixed up 

 together, was as courteously civil as could be desired, 

 and I began to suspect that my countrymen in England 

 knew as little of the real state and station of the Ame 

 ricans on board their river steamers, as Dickens, Mrs 

 Trollope, or Mrs Beecher Stowe did of the real state of 

 the slave ; or Messrs Cobden and Bright of the value of 

 railway speculations in the United States, or of the in 

 trinsic worth of universal suffrage and the ballot. 



When night came on, of course I expected to see 

 lights out at given points of the river to guide us on our 

 murky way, but there were no buoys, no lights, no 

 landmarks that I could detect ; yet the steamer moved 

 safely on as if by instinct, and I began to marvel at 

 everything I saw, or did not see, or, in fact, at my 

 immediate position. On going to bed, then, indeed, I 

 found discomfort, for, in addition to the warmth of the 



