It is some years since I addressed you last over this signature—indeed I should doubt if five per cent of your present readers will remember the “harvests” of a quiet (ought I to say “lazy” rather than “quiet”?) eye, which I was wont in those days, by your connivance, to submit to them in vacation times. Somehow to-day the old instinct has come back on me, possibly because I happen to be on an errand which should be of no small interest to us English just now; possibly because the last days of an Atlantic crossing seem to be so naturally provocative of the instinct for gossiping, that one is not satisfied with the abundant opportunities one gets on board the vessel in which one is a luxurious prisoner for ten days.

We have been going day and night since we left Queenstown harbour at an average rate of 18 (land) miles an hour. We are more than 1300 passengers (roughly 200 saloon, and the rest steerage), whose baggage, when added to the large cargo of dry goods we are carrying, sinks our beautiful craft till she draws 24 feet of water. She herself is more than 150 yards long, and weighs as she passes Sandy Hook,—well, I am fairly unable to calculate what she weighs, but as much, at any rate, as half a dozen luggage-trains on shore. We have had our last, or the captain’s dinner, at which fish, to all appearance as fresh as if the sailors had just caught them over the side, and lettuces, as crisp as if the steward had a nursery garden down below, have been served as part of a dinner which would have done no discredit to a first-class hotel; beginning with two sorts of soup, and ending with two sorts of ices. Similar dinners, with other meals to match—four solid ones in the twenty-four hours, besides odds and ends—have been served day by day, without a hitch, in a cabin kept as sweet as Atlantic air, constantly pumped into it by the engine, can make it.

By the way, sir, I may remark here, in connection with our feeding, that if we might be taken as average specimens of our race, there is no ground whatever for anxiety as to the Anglo-Saxon digestion, of which some disagreeable philosophers have spoken with disrespect and foreboding in recent years. There were, perhaps, ten persons whose native tongue was not English, and yet we carried our four solid meals a day with resolution bordering on the heroic. The racks were never on the tables, and we had only for a few hours a swell, which thinned our ranks for two meals; and yet when I look round, and make such inquiry as I can, I can see or hear of nothing more than a very slight trace of dyspepsia here and there. The principal change I remarked in the manners and customs on the voyage was the marked increase of play and betting on board. When I first crossed, ten years ago, there was nothing more than an occasional game at whist in the saloon or smoking-room. This voyage it was not easy to get out of the way of hard play except on deck. The best corner of the smoking-room was occupied from breakfast till “Out lights” by a steady poker party, and other smaller and more casual groups played fitfully at the other tables. There were always whist and other games going on in the saloon, but of a soberer and (in a pecuniary sense) more innocent character. There were “pools” of a sovereign or a half sovereign on every event of the day, “the run” being the most exciting issue. The drawer of the winning number seldom pocketed less than £40, when it was posted on the captain’s chart at noon. I heard that play is rather favoured now than otherwise on all the lines, as a percentage is almost always paid to the funds of the Sailors’ Orphan Asylum, for which excellent charity a collection is also legitimately made during every passage. We were good supporters, and collected nearly £70 at our entertainment, which I attribute partly to the fact that we had on board a leading American actor, who most good-naturedly “turned himself loose” for us, and that the plates at the two doors were held by the daughters of an English earl, and an (late, alas!) American ambassador of great eminence. The countries could not have been more characteristically or charmingly represented, and the charity owes them its best thanks.

There was the usual mine of information and entertainment, to be struck with ease by the merest novice in conversational shaft-sinking. Why is it that folk are so much more ready to talk on an Atlantic steamer than elsewhere? I myself “struck ile,” in several directions, one of a sad kind—Scotch farmers of the highest type going out to select new homes, where there will be no factors. The most remarkable of these appeared to have made up his mind finally when he had been told that he would not be allowed a penny at the end of his lease for the addition of three rooms he was obliged to make to his house, as his family were growing up. Have landlords and factors gone mad, in face of the serious times which are on them?

There were quite an abundance of parsons, of many denominations, and all of mark. Prayers on Sunday were read by a New England Episcopalian, and the sermon preached by a Scotch Free Kirk minister. All were men of broad views, in some cases verging on Latitudinarianism to a point which rejoiced my heretic soul, e.g. a Protestant minister in a great American western city, whose church had recently been rebuilt. Looking round to find where his flock could be best housed on Sundays, pending reconstruction, he found the neighbouring synagogue by far the most convenient, and proposed to go there. His people cordially agreed, and despite the furious raging of the (so-called) religious press, into the synagogue they went for their Sunday services, stayed there six months, and when they left, were only charged for the gas by the Rabbi. An intimacy sprung up. It appeared that the Rabbi looked upon our Lord as the first of the inspired men of his nation, greater than Moses or Samuel, and in the end the two congregations met at a service conducted partly by the Rabbi and partly by my informant!—a noteworthy sign of the times, but one at which I fear many even of your readers will shake their heads.

There were some Confederate officers, ready to talk without bitterness of the war, and I was very glad to improve the occasion, having never had the chance of a look from that side the curtain. Anything more grim and humorous than the picture of Southern society during those awful four years I never hope to meet with. The entire want of regular medicines, especially bark, was their greatest trouble in his eyes. In his brigade their remedy for “the shakes” came to be a plaster of raw turpentine, just drawn from the pine woods, laid on down the back. Some one suggested that pills were very portable, and easily imported. “Pills!” he said scornfully; “pills, sir, were as scarce in our brigade as the grace of God in a grog shop at midnight.” Nothing so much brought out to me the horrors of civil war as his account of the perfect knowledge each side had of the plans and doings on the other. A Northern officer, he had since come to know, was leaning against a post within three yards of Jeff. Davis when he made his famous speech announcing the supersession of Joe Johnson as the general fronting Sherman. Sherman had heard it in a few hours, and was acting on the news before nightfall. The most terrible example was that of the mining of the Richmond lines. The defenders knew almost to a foot where the mines were, and when they were to be fired. Breckenbridge’s division, in which he fought, were drawn up in line to repel the attack when the earthworks went up in the air, and the assailants rushed into the great gap which had been made, and which was nearly filled, before they fell back, with the bodies of Northern soldiers. For the last two years, in almost every battle he had all he could do to hold his own against the front attack, knowing and feeling all the while that the enemy was overlapping and massing on both flanks, and that he would have to retire his regiment before they could close. And yet they held together to the last!

I pity mothers, too, down South,

Altho’ they sat amongst the scorners.

It is a curious experience, and one well worth trying, this ten days’ voyage. When you go on board at Liverpool, and look round at the first dinner, there are probably not half a dozen faces you ever saw before. By the time you walk out of the ship, bag in hand, on to the New York landing-place, there are scarcely half a dozen with» whom you have not a pleasant speaking acquaintance; while with a not inconsiderable number you feel (unless you have had singularly bad luck) as if you must have known them intimately for years, without having been aware of it. As you touch the land, the express men and hotel touts rush on you, and the spell is broken. The little society resolves itself at their touch into separate atoms, which are whirled away, without time to wish one another God-speed, into the turbulent ocean of New York life, never again to be gathered together as a society in this world, for worship, for food, or fun. “The present life of man, 0 king!” said a Saxon thane in Edwin’s Witenagemot, when they were consulting whether Augustine and his priests should be allowed to settle at Canterbury, “reminds me of one of your winter feasts where you sit with your thanes and counsellors. The hearth blazes in our midst, and a grateful heat is spread around, while storms of rain and snow are raging without. A little sparrow enters at one door and flies delighted around us, till it departs through the other. Such is the life of man, and we are as ignorant of the state which went before us as of that which will follow it. Things being so,” went on the thane, “I feel that if this new faith can give us more certainty, it deserves to be received,”—which last sentiment has, I allow, no bearing on the present subject, nor, perhaps you will say, has the rest of it. But somehow the old story came into my head so vividly as I was leaving the steamer, that I feel like tossing it on to your readers, to see what they can make of it; though I own, on looking at it again, I am not myself clear as to the interpretation, or whether I am the sparrow or the thane.

New York is more overwhelming than ever,—surely the most tremendous human mill on this planet; but I must not begin upon it at the end of a letter.