have been taken by strangers for some whitewashed fort
on a floating isle.

Merchants on 'change seem the passengers that buzz on her decks, while,
from quarters unseen, comes a murmur as of bees in the comb. Fine
promenades, domed saloons, long galleries, sunny balconies, confidential
passages, bridal chambers, state-rooms plenty as pigeon-holes, and
out-of-the-way retreats like secret drawers in an escritoire, present
like facilities for publicity or privacy. Auctioneer or coiner, with
equal ease, might somewhere here drive his trade.

Though her voyage of twelve hundred miles extends from apple to orange,
from clime to clime, yet, like any small ferry-boat, to right and left,
at every landing, the huge Fidele still receives additional passengers
in exchange for those that disembark; so that, though always full of
strangers, she continually, in some degree, adds to, or replaces them
with strangers still more strange; like Rio Janeiro fountain, fed from
the Cocovarde mountains, which is ever overflowing with strange waters,
but never with the same strange particles in every part.

Though hitherto, as has been seen, the man in cream-colors had by no
means passed unobserved, yet by stealing into retirement, and there
going asleep and continuing so, he seemed to have courted oblivion, a
boon not often withheld from so humble an applicant as he. Those staring
crowds on the shore were now left far behind, seen dimly clustering like
swallows on eaves; while the passengers' attention was soon drawn away
to the rapidly shooting high bluffs and shot-towers on the Missouri
shore, or the bluff-looking Missourians and towering Kentuckians among
the throngs on the decks.

By-and-by--two or three random stoppages having been made, and the last
transient memory of the slumberer vanished, and he himself, not
unlikely, waked up and landed ere now--the crowd, as is usual, began in
all parts to break up from a concourse into various clusters or squads,
which in some cases disintegrated again into quartettes, trios, and
couples, or even solitaires; involuntarily submitting to that natural
law which ordains dissolution equally to the mass, as in time to the
member.

As among Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims, or those oriental ones crossing
the Red Sea towards Mecca in the festival month, there was no lack of
variety. Natives of all sorts, and foreigners; men of business and men
of pleasure; parlor men and backwoodsmen; farm-hunters and f