It is a return to that classic out-of-door experience and mingling of public and domestic economy which so ennobled the straight-nosed Athenian. So universal is this desire to be present at the departure of any steamer that, aside from the regular crowd of loungers who make their appearance confessedly only to look on, there are others who take advantage of the slightest intimacy to go through the leave-taking formula. People whom you have quite forgotten, people to whom you have been lately introduced, suddenly and unexpectedly make their appearance and wring your hands with fervor. The friend, long estranged, forgives you nobly at the last moment, to take advantage of this glorious opportunity of “seeing you off.” Your bootmaker, tailor, and hatter--haply with no ulterior motives and unaccompanied by official friends--visit you with enthusiasm. You find great difficulty in detaching your relatives and acquaintances from the trunks on which they resolutely seat themselves, up to the moment when the paddles are moving, and you are haunted continually by an ill-defined idea that they may be carried off, and foisted on you--with the payment of their passage, which, under the circumstances, you could not refuse--for the rest of the voyage. Your friends will make their appearance at the most inopportune moments, and from the most unexpected places,--dangling from hawsers, climbing up paddle-boxes, and crawling through cabin windows at the imminent peril of their lives. You are nervous and crushed by this added weight of responsibility. Should you be a stranger, you will find any number of people on board, who will cheerfully and at a venture take leave of you on the slightest advances made on your part. A friend of mine assures me that he once parted, with great enthusiasm and cordiality, from a party of gentlemen, to him personally unknown, who had apparently mistaken his state-room. This party,--evidently connected with some fire company,--on comparing notes on the wharf, being somewhat dissatisfied with the result of their performances, afterward rendered my friend's position on the hurricane deck one of extreme peril and inconvenience, by reason of skilfully projected oranges and apples, accompanied with some invective. Yet there is certainly something to interest us in the examination of that cheerless damp closet, whose painted wooden walls no furniture or company can make habitable, wherein our friend is to spend so many vapid days and restless nights. The sight of these apartments, yclept STATE-ROOMS,--Heaven knows why, except it be from their want of cosiness,--is full of keen reminiscences to most Californians who have not outgrown the memories of that dreary interval when, in obedience to nature's wise compensations, homesickness was blotted out by sea-sickness, and both at last resolved into a chaotic and distempered dream, whose details we now recognize. The steamer chair