Besides the ship officers, the engines were under the command of a chief engineer, assisted by eight or ten engineering officers, and a battalion of two hundred and fifty men, some stokers, others oilers, who hardly ever left the engine-rooms. This army of men was well occupied night and day, having ten boilers with ten furnaces and about a hundred fires to attend to. As for the crew of the steam-ship proper, what with quartermasters, top-men, steersmen, and cabin-boys, it comprised about one hundred men, and besides these, there were two hundred stewards employed for serving the passengers. Every man was at his post; the pilot who was to conduct the vessel out of the Mersey had been on board since the evening before. I saw also a French pilot, who was to make the passage with us, and on her return to take the steam-ship into anchorage at Brest. “I begin to think we shall sail to-day,” said I to Lieutenant H—. “We are only waiting for our passengers,” replied my countryman. “Are there many?” “Twelve or thirteen hundred.” At half-past eleven the tender was hailed, laden with passengers, who, as I afterwards learnt, were Californians, Canadians, Americans, Peruvians, English, Germans, and two or three Frenchmen. Among the most distinguished were the celebrated Cyrus Field of New York, the Honourable John Rose of Canada, the Honourable J. Mac Alpine of New York, Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Cohen of San Francisco, Mr. and Mrs. Whitney of Montreal, Captain Mc Ph—— and his wife. Among the French was the founder of the “Great Eastern Freight Company,” M. Jules D——, representative of the “Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company,” who had made a contribution of twenty thousand pounds to the fund. The tender ranged herself at the foot of a flight of steps, and then began the slow, interminable ascent of passengers and luggage. The first care of each passenger, when he had once set foot on the steamer, was to go and secure his place in the dining-room; his card, or his name written on a scrap of paper, was enough to insure his possession. [Illustration: THEN BEGAN THE SLOW INTERMINABLE ASCENT.] I remained on deck in order to notice all the details of embarkation. At half-past twelve the luggage was all on board, and I saw thousands of packages of every description, from chests large enough to contain a suite of furniture, to elegant little travelling-cases and fanciful American and English trunks, heaped together pell-mell. All these were soon cleared from the deck, and stowed away in the store-rooms; workmen and porters returned to the tender, which steered off, after having blackened the side of the “Great Eastern” with her smoke. I was going back towards the bows, when suddenly I found myself face to face with the young man I had seen on Prince’s Landing-Stage. He stopped on seeing me, and held out his hand, which I warmly shook. “You, Fabian!” I cried. “You here?” “Even so, my dear friend.”