Europe -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
Here we are lying quietly at anchor in Lough Foyle after an excellent
breakfast. We wait here for the mails, but as it is nineteen miles
I find by road up to Derry, I shall not make the attempt. The plot
thickens on board, and I am already deeply interested. There are 150
emigrants from the East End, who are being taken over by their parson
and a philanthropist whose name I haven’t caught yet. I have been
forward amongst these poor folk, and have won several hearts or at least
opened many mouths by distributing some few spare stamps I luckily had
in my pocket. Lovely as the morning is, and delicious as the contrast
between the exquisite air on deck, where they are all sitting, when
contrasted with Whitechapel air, I can’t help looking at them with very
mingled feelings. They are a fine steady respectable class of poor. The
women nursing and caring for their children with grave, serious, sweet
faces, and the men really attentive. All of them anxious to send off
scraps of letters to their friends in Great Babylon. There is one
slip of the foredeck roped off entirely for nursing mothers and small
children, and there are a lot of quaint little plumps rolling and
tumbling about there, with some of whom I hope to make friends. A
bird-fancier from the East End has several cages full of larks and
sparrows, and a magpie and jay in state cabins by themselves, all of
which he hopes to make great merchandise of in Canada, where English
birds are longed for, but are very hard to keep. He had lost his
hempseed in Liverpool, but luckily a boat has gone ashore, and I think
there is good hope of getting him a fresh supply. There is a little
gathering of the emigrants for service at eight in the evening forward.
I didn’t know of it last night, but shall attend henceforth. No thought
of such a thing in the state saloon! “How hardly shall they that have
riches”!
Here, as elsewhere, the truest and deepest life, because the simplest,
lies amongst those who have little of the things of this world lying
between them and their Father and this invisible world, with its
realities.
On board the Peruvian.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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