into port to the intense relief of everyone concerned. Pitching and rolling, washed fore and aft, swept from one gunwale to the other, a hell afloat for the timid and sea-sick, and a source of the gravest anxiety to her officers, she was too small to be equal to her task, too barely furnished to make life other than just tolerable. Cooped up in bad weather below, where ventilation was sadly lacking; crowded with men, women and children going out to the New World to try their fortunes; with hard, scanty sleeping accommodation that was not even human in its comfort; gangways crowded with mean luggage, and no proper commissariat department; no refrigerating machinery, no preserved foods, but a medley of animals on deck to be killed and consumed as required--if they were not washed overboard by the unkindly Atlantic seas--it was no wonder that when at last the dragged-out agony was ended the passengers stepped ashore with firm resolutions never more to entrust themselves to the uncertain vagaries of the sea and its ships. [Illustration: CHARLES DICKENS’S STATE-ROOM ON THE “BRITANNIA.” _By permission of the Cunard Steamship Co._] When Charles Dickens crossed in January of 1842, not then was the experience one of delight or anything approaching thereto. The ship on which he travelled to America was the Cunard _Britannia_, bound for Halifax and Boston with the mails. Of the other features of this early steamship we have already spoken, but some of the impressions which Dickens has left us regarding the comfort, or the want of it, on board this ship are worthy of attention by those who find cause for complaint even in the perfectly appointed travelling Atlantic “hotels” of to-day. Something of the appearance of his state-room may be seen by looking at the illustration facing this page, which is here inserted by the courtesy of the Cunard Company. “That this state-room had been specially engaged for ‘Charles Dickens Esquire and Lady,’” he remarks in his “American Notes,” “was rendered sufficiently clear even to my scared intellect by a very small manuscript announcing the fact, which was pinned on a very flat quilt, covering a very thin mattress, spread like a surgical plaster on a most inaccessible shelf.” He speaks of his cabin as an “utterly impracticable, thoroughly hopeless, and profoundly preposterous box.” What he thought of the _Britannia’s_ saloon is depicted for us in no sparing terms. “Before descending into the bowels of the ship,” he adds, “we had passed from the deck into a long, narrow apartment, not unlike a gigantic hearse with windows in the sides; having at the upper end a melancholy stove, at which three or four chilly stewards were warming their hands; while on either side, extending down its whole dreary length, was a long, long table, over each of which a rack, fixed to the low roof, and stuck full of drinking-glasses and cruet-stands, hinted dismally at rolling seas and heavy weather.” What he would have thought of the