In a word, we found ourselves in the midst of a confusion which none but the experienced traveller can coolly contemplate. Our friends, or rather the more daring of them, scrambled over the intervening decks, or hailed us from the rigging of the neighboring vessels. We would have invited them on board, but there was no room to receive them; besides the descent was perilous. All partings are much alike, but ours were made with a prodigious affectation of good spirits. We were to have sailed precisely at ten; but when eleven was chimed, the number which had come “expressly to see us off,” was sensibly diminished; and at twelve we were left to our own contemplations. There was a prodigious pulling of ropes; the same boxes were tumbled from one place to another and back again; trunks disappeared and came to light, and it seemed as if everybody was engaged in a grand search for nobody knew what. At one o’clock the pilot came on board. The delay had become painful, and now we thought the time for sailing had arrived. But the pilot was a fat man, and sat down imperturbably upon a water-cask. “Well, Mr. Pilot, are we off?” He deigned no audible reply, but glanced upwards significantly towards the streamer at the masthead. The wind blew briskly in from the Narrows. So we seated ourselves upon the water-casks also, and watched the men who were painting the next ship, and almost nodded ourselves to sleep, to the monotonous “yo-ho” of the sailors unloading an Indiaman near by. The roar of Broadway fell subdued and distant upon our ears; and the ferry-boats and little steamers in the river seemed to move about in silence, going to and fro apparently without an object, like ants around an anthill. By-and-by a little, black bull-dog of a steamer thrust itself valiantly through the crowd of vessels, made a rope fast to our bows, and dragged us, with a jerk, triumphantly into the stream, past Governor’s Island, down to the outer bay, and then left us to take care of ourselves. That night the sun went down cold and filmy, and the Francis tumbled roughly about amidst the dark waves of the Atlantic. * * * A calm under the high capes of San Domingo,—an infinitude of thunder squalls, with the pleasant consciousness of a hundred kegs of gunpowder stowed snugly around the foot of the mainmast,—a “close shave” on the coral reefs below Jamaica,—for twenty-six mortal days this was all which we had of relief from the detestable monotony of shipboard. Blessed be steam! * * * *