NATURE IN ENGLAND. 



part of the voyage was the impression it made as of 

 going afield in an ocean steamer. We had suddenly 

 passed from a wilderness of waters into a verdurous, 

 sunlit landscape, where scarcely any water was visi- 

 ble. The Clyde, soon after you leave Greenock, be- 

 comes little more than a large, deep canal, inclosed 

 between meadow banks, and from the deck of the 

 great steamer only the most charming rural sights 

 and sounds greet you. You are at sea amid verdant 

 parks and fields of clover and grain. You behold 

 farm occupations sowing, planting, plowing as 

 from the middle of the Atlantic. Playful heifers and 

 skipping lambs take the place of the leaping dolphins 

 and the basking sword-fish. The ship steers her way 

 amid turnip-fields and broad acres of newly planted 

 potatoes. You are not surprised that she needs pilot- 

 ing. A little tug with a rope at her bow pulls her 

 first this way and then that, while one at her stern 

 nudges her right flank and then her left. Presently 

 we come to the ship - building yards of the Clyde, 

 where rural, pastoral scenes are strangely mingled 

 with those of quite another sort. " First a cow and 

 then an iron ship," as one of the voyagers observed. 

 Here a pasture, or a meadow, or a field of wheat or 

 oats, and close beside it, without an inch of waste or 

 neutral ground between, rise the skeletons of innu- 

 merable ships, like a forest of slender growths of iron, 

 with the workmen hammering amid it like so many 

 noisy woodpeckers. It is doubtful if such a scene 

 can be witnessed anywhere else in the world an 



