n two
thousand fathoms water--what exquisite forms might there not be?
myriads on myriads, generations on generations, people the eternal
darkness, seen only by Him to whom the darkness is as light as day:
and to be seen hereafter, a few of them--but how few--when future
men of science shall do for this mid-Atlantic sea-floor what Dr.
Carpenter and Dr. Wyville Thomson have done for the North Atlantic,
and open one more page of that book which has, to us creatures of a
day, though not to Him who wrote it as the Time-pattern of His
timeless mind, neither beginning nor end.

So, for want of animal life to study, we were driven to study the
human life around us, pent up there in our little iron world. But
to talk too much of fellow-passengers is (though usual enough just
now) neither altogether fair nor kind. We see in travel but the
outside of people, and as we know nothing of their inner history,
and little, usually, of their antecedents, the pictures which we
might sketch of them would be probably as untruthfully as rashly
drawn. Crushed together, too, perforce, against each other, people
are apt on board ship to make little hasty confidences, to show
unawares little weaknesses, which should be forgotten all round the
moment they step on shore and return to something like a normal
state of society. The wisest and most humane rule for a traveller
toward his companion is to

'Be to their faults a little blind;
Be to their virtues very kind;'

and to consider all that is said and done on board, like what passes
among the members of the same club, as on the whole private and
confidential. So let it suffice that there were on board the good
steamship Shannon, as was to be expected, plenty of kind, courteous,
generous, intelligent people; officials, travellers--one, happy man!
away to discover new birds on the yet unexplored Rio Magdalena, in
New Grenada; planters, merchants, what not, all ready, when once at
St. Thomas's, to spread themselves over the islands, and the Spanish
Main, and the Isthmus of Panama, and after that, some of them, down
the Pacific shore to Callao and Valparaiso. The very names of their
different destinations, and the imagination of the wonders they
would see (though we were going to a spot as full of wonders as
any), raised something like envy in our breasts, all the more
because most of them persisted in tantalising us, in the hospitable
fashion of al