rter-deck.
"She's from England!" said the husband, expressively.
"Only fancy!" answered the wife. "Give me the glass, Jenny." Then, after
a long survey of the steamer, she added, "Fancy her being from England!"
They all looked and said nothing for two or three minutes, when the
wife's mind turned to the delay of their own boat and of breakfast.
"This thing," she said, with that air of uttering a novelty which the
English cast about their commonplaces,--"this this thing doesn't start
at seven, you know."
"No," replied the younger woman, "she waits for the Montreal boat."
"Fancy her being from England!" said the other, whose eyes and thoughts
had both wandered back to the Liverpool steamer.
"There's the Montreal boat now, comin' round the point," cried the
husband. "Don't you see the steam?" He pointed with his glass, and then
studied the white cloud in the distance. "No, by Jove! it's a saw-mill
on the shore."
"O Harry!" sighed both the women, reproachfully.
"Why, deuce take it, you know," he retorted, "I didn't turn it into a
saw-mill. It's been a saw-mill all along, I fancy."
Half an hour later, when the Montreal boat came in sight, the women
would have her a saw-mill till she stood in full view in mid-channel.
Their own vessel paddled out into the stream as she drew near, and the
two bumped and rubbed together till a gangway plank could he passed from
one to the other. A very well dressed young man stood ready to get upon
the Saguenay boat, with a porter beside him bearing his substantial
valise. No one else apparently was coming aboard.
The English people looked upon him for an instant with wrathful eyes, as
they hung over the rail of the promenade. "Upon my word," said the elder
of the women, "have we been waitin' all this time for one man?"
"Hush, Edith," answered the younger, "it's an Englishman." And they all
three mutely recognized the right of the Englishman to stop, not only
the boat, but the whole solar system, if his ticket entitled him to a
passage on any particular planet, while Mr. Miles Arbuton of Boston,
Massachusetts, passed at his ease from one vessel to the other. He had
often been mistaken for an Englishman, and the error of those
spectators, if he had known it, would not have surprised him. Perhaps it
might have softened his judgment of them as he sat facing them at
breakfast; but he did not know it, and he thought them three very common
English people with something profession
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