"). At any rate, the difference between their aspect
and that of the sail-boat is that of a beetle and a butterfly. The acme
of ugliness is reached in the freight ferry-boats, floating fragments of
railroad, whose cars look like the joints of a monstrous creeping worm.

No one, however, can complain of any want of variety in these
steam-craft, whether in size or in shape, from the rather stately
steamships to the little tug-boats that shoot to and fro like gnats upon
the surface of a pool. I say _rather_ stately, for the high and graceful
hull of the steamer comes to a lame and impotent conclusion in its squat
chimney, like a large-faced man with a mayhemed nose, and in its toy
masts and rigging, like a stout woman with curl-papers or a thin wisp of
ringlet. When two or three of these steamships are together down the
harbor, their white volleys of smoke often present quite a lively
picture of a naval engagement. The little puffing pilot-boats have a
trick of getting in the way of us ferry-voyagers, like fussy
custom-house officers among the newly-landed passengers from the
ocean-ferries. There is generally a tug, perhaps with a slow convoy, to
be waited for or circumnavigated ere the "slip" can be entered. And they
run so close in-shore that the pilot has to be wary, and in some cases
to emerge with a series of unearthly steam screeches, lest he step upon
one of them with his great "horseshoe" of a ferry-boat. The steam-yacht
is the most graceful as well as agile of the species, as certainly it
ought to be when as much money is sometimes put into one as would buy a
Raphael or build a Grecian temple. The steam-yacht has doubtless a
thousand comforts for the owner above the sailing-yacht, but we, whose
interest in them is an outside and aesthetic one, cannot help saying, "O
Utility, what crimes are committed in thy name!"

There is no beauty, but a deal of attraction, in the great flotillas of
linked barges and canal-boats which slowly pass like floating and vulgar
Venices. If, as is often the case, they lie across the track, we shall
have plenty of opportunity to observe at our leisure their still life. I
have always thought that canal-life--by reason of its amphibiousness,
its phenomenal slowness, its monotony amid endless change, its solitude
amid busy and peopled scenes which it is always touching but never
entering--must be a unique existence, a _modus vivendi_ quite apart from
other human experiences by land or sea.