nd with ourselves; and the
crowded tables, the good-natured jostling of elbows, and the eager
scrambling for food, with the bells of variously bound steamers at the
neighboring pier already ringing out their warning, exhilarated us with
a sense of companionship and excited us to activity. Indeed, the analogy
which I detected between hotel life in the Highlands and in our own
country may have been partly due to these hasty breakfasts, which the
necessity of securing a long day rendered as inevitable to tourists as
hurriedly bolted meals so often are to travellers on our interminable
routes, or to our time-saving business-men of callous digestion.

After all, we had the mortification of feeling that we had been deceived
like children and huddled like sheep as an atonement for the
sluggishness or obstinacy of that less alert and punctual class of
travellers who, as the experience of steamboat agents had proved, could
be aroused only by successive bell-ringings and repeated threats of a
forfeited passage. We had some compensation and revenge, however, as,
seated in our early secured best places, we watched our
fellow-excursionists come straggling on board.

The Pioneer, strongly built for service in the open sea, and of ample
dimensions, must have boasted this day something like two hundred
passengers. So ample were the accommodations, so widely scattered the
parties, that I should scarcely believe the number to have been so
considerable, but for my vivid recollection of the successive and, as it
seemed, never-ending boat-companies, each of a dozen or more, that were
rowed ashore at the points where we made land. Of course there was but a
fractional part of these people whose individuality made any impression
on me. In one respect we were a unit: all were pleasure-seekers, and the
Pioneer, unlike most of the steaming monsters which ply on regular
routes, was dedicated to beauty, sacred to the adventurous and the
picturesque. She carried no mail; she was destined to none of the ends
of traffic or profit. Her freight was all human, Nature was her
mistress, and the love of Nature her inspiration and motive-power.

But as she lay there at the pier, puffing off steam and ringing
perpetual bells, she gave evidence of business-like impatience; and her
human cargo, as they came on board, had scarcely yet awakened to any
other emotions than those of unwillingness and discomfort. Some were yet
chewing the cud of unfinished breakfas