He was struck, too, by the reflection that savage nature was not by any
means such a fine and noble spectacle as some delight to represent it.
He found it a poor, greasy, paint-plastered, miserable thing enough; but
a very little way above the beasts in most respects; in many customs a
long way below them. It occurred to him that the ‘Big Bird,’ or the
‘Blue Fish,’ or any of the other Braves, was but a troublesome braggart
after all; making a mighty whooping and holloaing about nothing
particular, doing very little for science, not much more than the
monkeys for art, scarcely anything worth mentioning for letters, and not
often making the world greatly better than he found it. Civilisation,
MR. BOOLEY concluded, was, on the whole, with all its blemishes, a more
imposing sight, and a far better thing to stand by.
MR. BOOLEY’S observations of the celestial bodies, on this voyage, were
principally confined to the discovery of the alarming fact, that light
had altogether departed from the moon; which presented the appearance of
a white dinner-plate. The clouds, too, conducted themselves in an
extraordinary manner, and assumed the most eccentric forms, while the
sun rose and set in a very reckless way. On his return to his native
country, however, he had the satisfaction of finding all these things as
usual.
It might have been expected that at his advanced age, retired from the
active duties of life, blest with a competency, and happy in the
affections of his numerous relations, MR. BOOLEY would now have settled
himself down, to muse, for the remainder of his days, over the new stock
of experience thus acquired. But travel had whetted, not satisfied, his
appetite; and remembering that he had not seen the Ohio river, except at
the point of its junction with the Mississippi, he returned to the
United States, after a short interval of repose, and appearing suddenly
at Cincinnati, the queen City of the West, traversed the clear waters of
the Ohio to its Falls. In this expedition he had the pleasure of
encountering a party of intelligent workmen from Birmingham who were
making the same tour. Also his nephew Septimus, aged only thirteen. This
intrepid boy had started from Peckham, in the old country, with two and
sixpence sterling in his pocket; and had, when he encountered his uncle
at a point of the Ohio River, called Snaggy Bar, still one shilling of
that sum remaining!
Again at home, MR. BOOLEY was so pressed by his appetite for knowledge
as to remain at home only one day. At the expiration of that short
period, he actually started for New Zealand.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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