DISCOMFORTS. 139 



weather, the hot steam or vapour, for it was not damp, 

 found its way from the engine-room into my cabin, and 

 produced such a state of thick and heated atmosphere 

 that respiration was impeded, and sleep out of the ques 

 tion. In addition to this, the thumping of the ma 

 chinery and roar of the wheels were close under me, and 

 altogether they produced such an amalgamation of 

 noises that I wished myself in my waggon on the upper 

 deck. To remedy the evil, however, I shifted from the 

 lower to the upper berth in my cabin, and set open each 

 little window above the respective doors, and thus from 

 time to time caught a mouthful of fresh air. 



Morning came, when, having bribed a sable, and 

 therefore civil, attendant to fill my blessed tin bath 

 trunk with the cool waters of the river, a giant refreshed, 

 I stepped out on the lower deck to worship the skies, 

 and to revel in the fresh but not the sweet air that came 

 through the autumn-tinted woods. When I say " the 

 fresh but not the sweet air," I speak with comparative 

 reference to the airs of Old England. In America there 

 is not that sweet diffusion of fragrant flowers or 

 withered bloom in the atmosphere which so often reaches 

 the senses in England, and speaks to the soul of persons 

 and of places with whom or in which bygone hours of 

 happiness have been passed, for the wild flowers of 

 America have not any of them a perfume, and such 

 scents as the withered leaves might be supposed capable 

 of affording are disguised by a palpable or earthy smell 

 of dust, and they, like the flowers, tell no tales of a 

 summer hour. The morning was lovely, and the sky 

 above the forests that stood on the banks of, and were 

 tumbling into, the river, as if sending other trees to 

 swell the numbers of the pallid and drowned but still 



