328 ISLES OF SUMMER. 
gay mantle of spring, and greeted us with sunny smiles, we 
knew that more disease and discomfort lay ambushed within its 
thirty-one days than can be found in any three of the remaining 
months of the year. It might deceive the flowers—they have 
perished in its frosts before; and the birds that have more mei- 
ody and beauty than mind and brains; and tempt the fish back 
to their old spawning grounds—a shad cannot be expected to 
know any better—but as for us, we said, we would seek for sum- 
mer where summer lives and reigns throughout the entire circle 
of the revolving year, where the northern March is unknown. 
Our arrangements were soon made, and the steamer Elm City 
landed us safely in New York, after a refreshing night’s sleep. 
Before the break of day, while we skirted the eastern shore of 
Manhattan Island, we looked out of our stateroom window, 
through the murky and humid ‘air, upon the sleeping city, and 
mused and marveled at the wondrous changes which an hour or 
two of daylight would produce. Its shipping and great business 
arteries were but dimly revealed in the gas-light and lamp-light, 
while gloomy vapors concealed from view its dome of stars. The 
fevered and mad pulses that so wildly beat and throb by day, 
were soothed and quieted by kind nature’s grand opiate and re- 
storative, sleep. Day and night work wondrous changes in our 
country’s great commercial capital. Ocean in calm and storm 
is not more unlike than a great city at mid-day and mid-night. 
O, how we abominate the horrid noises of its crowded streets— 
the awful solitude of its thoroughfares! 
It was between eight and nine o’clock in the morning when 
the astonishing fact was discovered that our trunks had not ac- 
companied us to New York, they having been left unchecked at 
the steamboat dock at New Haven! Our stateroom in the Wes- 
tern Texas was engaged, and the steamer was advertised to sail 
at3 P.M. ofthesame day. Had we lost our money we could have 
