of landing, the engine stops, the boat is lowered--the captain always convoys his passengers himself from the steamer to the shore--away darts the tiny skiff, held by a rope to the main boat; as soon as it grazes the land, its freight, animate and inanimate, is bundled out, the boat hauls itself back in an instant, and immediately the machine is in motion, and the vessel again bounding over the water like a race-horse.[54] Doubtless all this has many and great advantages; but to an English person, the mere circumstance of being the whole day in a crowd is a nuisance. As to privacy at any time, or under any circumstances, 'tis a thing that enters not into the imagination of an American. They do not seem to comprehend that to be from sunrise to sunset one of a hundred and fifty people confined in a steam-boat is in itself a great misery, or that to be left by one's self and to one's self can ever be desirable. They live all the days of their lives in a throng, eat at ordinaries of two or three hundred, sleep five or six in a room, take pleasure in droves, and travel by swarms.[55] * * * * * In spite, therefore, of all its advantages, this mode of journeying has its drawbacks, and the greatest of all, to me, is the being _companioned_ by so many strangers, who crowd about you, pursue their conversation in your very ears, or, if they like it better, listen to yours, stare you out of all countenance, and squeeze you out of all comfort. It is perfectly intolerable to me; but then I have more than even the national English abhorrence of coming in contact with strangers. There is no moment of my life when I would not rather be alone than in company; and feeling, as I often do, the society of even those I love a burden, the being eternally surrounded by indifferent persons is a positive suffering that interferes with every enjoyment, and makes pleasure three parts endurance. I think this constant living in public is one reason why the young women here are much less retiring and shy than English girls. Instead of the domestic privacy in which women among us are accustomed to live, and move, and have their being, here they are incessantly, as Mr. ---- says, "_en évidence_." Accustomed to the society of strangers, mixing familiarly with persons of whom they know nothing earthly, subject to the gaze of a crowd from morning till night, pushing, and pressing, and struggling in self-defence, conversing, and being conversed with, by the chance companions of a boarding-house, a steam-boat, or the hotel of a fashionable watering-place, they must necessarily lose every thing like reserve or bashfulness of deportment, and become free and familiar in their manners, and noisy and unrefined in their tone and style of conversation.[56] An English girl of sixteen, put on board one of these Noah's arks (for verily there be clean and unclean beasts in them), would feel and look like a scared thing. To return to our progress.