FLORIDA AND THE WEST INDIES 7 



loved to deck them, but always something more 

 than Christmas trees hung with gauds. The 

 children seemed prematurely old and grave, and 

 no wonder. Precocious baby girls played bridge 

 and ate late dinner ; precocious baby boys ate late 

 dinner, used long words, argued with their elders 

 unrebuked, and despised, in the strenuous great- 

 ness of their republican souls, the simple deck 

 frolic which, as I remember, used to please less 

 sophisticated English lads on P. & O. steamers 

 bound home from the East. One bookish little 

 Philadelphian, a delightful little prig of nine, with 

 that curious American sallowness that always 

 reminds me of poor Stephen Crane, made friends 

 with me the second day out, and reminded me of 

 one of Mr Andrew Lang's touching confessions of 

 boyish precocity, for it was easy to picture this 

 serious-eyed stripling reciting snatches of Omar or 

 Ruskin on his way to baseball, leapfrog, or any other 

 occasional game for which his hard-worked baby- 

 hood may reluctantly find leisure. Not yet had he 

 transcended that cloudy "If," to which a great 

 countryman of his once referred as a shadow on his 

 youth, and his small, tired eyes looked pathetically 

 out on a world full of the problems with which his 

 infant mind vainly wrestled. In the University on 

 the banks of the Delaware, he doubtless has since 

 enjoyed blessed opportunities of starving his body 

 and feeding his brain. 



It is in the steerage that you find the most truly 

 human interest. The alluring green-and-white 

 drawing-room of the first saloon might come from 

 any hotel within five hundred yards of Trafalgar 

 Square, and the second might be a Soho restaurant 



