But the famous old steamboats of the Mississippi are gone. A few of the species still ply up and down, and some find their way up the Ohio and other tributaries, but the life seems gone from them. The romance of the Mississippi steamboat is dead. But a type of river steamer still in use is the one so common on the Hudson. Huge ships these are, with many decks, of great breadth, for often they are side-wheelers and their decks are carried out to the outside of the paddle boxes or, if they are propeller driven, still their decks reach out over the water. Deck on deck is piled one upon another, until the larger of these steamers may sail from New York to Poughkeepsie and West Point with as many passengers as the _Majestic_ is equipped to carry. But they are not to be compared to the _Majestic_ any more than a trolley car is to be compared to a Pullman. This chapter is a hodgepodge, and contains as great an assortment of goods as a country store, so I may, perhaps, be permitted to jump from the river steamers, to which I have done scant justice, to the tugs and other harbour craft that are occasionally to be seen about the many-decked river steamers at such a port as New York. Perhaps the ferries are most in evidence as they shuttle back and forth from Manhattan to Jersey City and Hoboken, to Weehawken and Fort Lee, to Staten and Governor’s islands, and to half a dozen slips in Brooklyn. These ferries are powerful vessels, and are capable of getting quickly under way. They have no bows or sterns—or, if you prefer, each end is bow or stern, depending on the direction the boat is travelling at the moment. The two ends, to make it plain, are identical. Each is round on deck. Each has a sharp “cut water” over which the round-ended deck projects. Each has a rudder, and each a propeller, save the old-fashioned ones—of which there are a few still in existence—that are driven by side paddle-wheels. The ends of these ferries are rounded and the slips at which they dock are so constructed as to fit the bows perfectly—so perfectly, in fact, that the automobiles and trucks with which the ferry is generally crowded drive ashore without a gangplank. In order to make simpler the task of docking these nimble craft two great rows of piles are driven into the harbour mud so that the ferries, entering between the outermost ends of these two “fences,” where they are at some distance from each other, are led directly to the slip by the converging lines of piles. Once the ferry’s nose has touched the slip, great hawsers are passed aboard and are made fast, whereupon special windlasses on the slip take up the slack and the boat is made fast, in hardly more time than it takes to tell of it. These ferries are sometimes of considerable size, but none of them are comparable in tonnage to anything more than the smallest of deep-sea steamers. [Illustration: A GREAT LAKES FREIGHT CARRIER