a
rosy Irish girl--had the happy idea of going, now and then, for a "day
off" and a breath of fresh air, on one of the ferry-boats that ply the
waters of Manhattan. Sometimes she took one of the ordinary ferries
that went straight over to New York and back again; but more often she
chose a boat that proposed a longer and more adventurous voyage--to
Hoboken, or Hunter's Point, or Staten Island. We would make the trip to
and fro several times, but Biddy never paid, so far as my memory goes,
more than one fare. By what arrangement or influence she made the
deckhands considerately blind to this repetition of the journey without
money and without price, I neither knew nor cared, being altogether
engaged with playing about the deck and admiring the wonders of the
vasty deep.

The other boats were wonderful, especially the big sailing-ships, which
were far more numerous then than they are now. The steam tugs, with
their bluff, pushing, hasty manners, were very attractive, and I
wondered why all of them had a gilt eagle, instead of a gull, on top of
the wheel-house. A little rowboat, tossing along the edge of the
wharves, or pushing out bravely for Governor's Island, seemed to be
full of perilous adventure. But most wonderful of all were the
sea-gulls, flying and floating all over the East River and the North
River and the bay.

Where did they come from? It was easy to see where they got their
living; they were "snappers-up of unconsidered trifles" from every
passing vessel whose cabin-boy threw the rubbish overboard. If you
could succeed in getting off the peel of an orange in two or three big
pieces, or if you could persuade yourself to leave a reasonably large
core of an apple, or, best of all, if you had the limp skin of a yellow
banana, you cast the forbidden fruit into the water, and saw how
quickly one of the gulls would pick it up, and how beautifully the
others would fight him for it. Evidently gulls have a wider range of
diet than little boys; also they have never been told that it is wrong
to fight.

"How greedy they are! What makes some of them white and some of them
gray? They must be different kinds; or else the gray ones are the
father and mother gulls. But if that is so, it is funny that the white
ones are the best fliers and seem able to take things away from the
gray ones. How would you like to fly like that? They swoop around and
go just where they want to. Perhaps that is the way the angels fly;
only o