In summer the excursion-boats add picturesqueness and a festive air to the river, with their gay bunting and bands of music and salutes with bell or steam-whistle, and, above all, their eager throngs of Sunday-school children or the liberated denizens of foul and narrow streets. At times the shipping along the docks and over the bay will blossom with the flags and streamers of all nations, hung fore and aft and extending in fluttering lines down the rigging, imparting a gala aspect to the scene and perhaps thrilling one with patriotic or historic memories. Perhaps we are crossing at the moment when the great Sound-steamers are pushing out from their piers. We feel quite humiliated on our lonely ferry-boat as these leviathans of nautical architecture sweep past us with an imperious curve far out into the stream, and then move steadily and statelily down the middle of the river, like an "ugly duckling" of mammoth proportions. One never gets over the sensation of that sight, nor its impressions as a type of our century,--a vast floating hotel, carrying the population of a village and the luxurious appointments of a palace, gliding as smoothly and noiselessly as an Indian's canoe, and propelled by an internal force apparently as vital and secret as that which moves the Indian's arm. Yonder comes an ocean-steamer, long, low, and black, with a tri-color flag at the stern, slowly and puffily tugged by a little pilot-boat. The decks literally swarm with figures in all sorts of outlandish garb,--gray and blue stuffs, long shaggy ulsters, Scotch caps and plaids, gay kerchiefs on the women's heads and necks. Some lounge, smoking or gibbering, over the taffrail, other groups sit picturesquely on their large rude boxes, but most of them are suggestively silent and statuesque. And well they may be, for it is the moment of fate to the poor emigrant as much as for Columbus when he approached the shore of a new world. A new world, indeed, in far more than the geographical sense; a new life, or at least a new attempt to live; old things passed away, and all things to be new--except himself. A great wave of homelessness in the wide world, and perhaps of sickness for the old home, sweeps over the poor exile's heart. All is so strange, and so sternly independent of their forlorn and insignificant selves. Perhaps they are being unladen from the ship, shunted down the gang-plank along with their chests, packed on a transfer-boat like so many imported cattle, only not with the care or tenderness with which a drove of Holsteins or Jerseys would be handled. A squad of emigrants, just landed on the wharf and waiting to be transferred to the emigrant-train for another week's voyage by land to the ends of the continent, is one of the most pathetic sights in this world, especially if they are foreign to our speech and dress and modes of life. How wistful and helpless and strayed they look!--a bit of still and stranded life in the sweep and roar of a world that must seem