floor. I was openly
jeered and flouted for this eccentricity; and a considerable knot would
sometimes gather at the door to see my last dispositions for the night.
This was embarrassing, but I learned to support the trial with
equanimity.

Indeed I may say that, upon the whole, my new position sat lightly and
naturally upon my spirits. I accepted the consequences with readiness,
and found them far from difficult to bear. The steerage conquered me; I
conformed more and more to the type of the place, not only in manner but
at heart, growing hostile to the officers and cabin passengers who
looked down upon me, and day by day greedier for small delicacies. Such
was the result, as I fancy, of a diet of bread and butter, soup and
porridge. We think we have no sweet tooth as long as we are full to the
brim of molasses; but a man must have sojourned in the workhouse before
he boasts himself indifferent to dainties. Every evening, for instance,
I was more and more preoccupied about our doubtful fare at tea. If it
was delicate my heart was much lightened; if it was but broken fish I
was proportionally downcast. The offer of a little jelly from a
fellow-passenger more provident than myself caused a marked elevation in
my spirits. And I would have gone to the ship's end and back again for
an oyster or a chipped fruit.

In other ways I was content with my position. It seemed no disgrace to
be confounded with my company; for I may as well declare at once I found
their manners as gentle and becoming as those of any other class. I do
not mean that my friends could have sat down without embarrassment and
laughable disaster at the table of a duke. That does not imply an
inferiority of breeding, but a difference of usage. Thus I flatter
myself that I conducted myself well among my fellow-passengers; yet my
most ambitious hope is not to have avoided faults, but to have committed
as few as possible. I know too well that my tact is not the same as
their tact, and that my habit of a different society constituted, not
only no qualification, but a positive disability to move easily and
becomingly in this. When Jones complimented me--because I "managed to
behave very pleasantly" to my fellow-passengers, was how he put it--I
could follow the thought in his mind, and knew his compliment to be such
as we pay foreigners on their proficiency in English. I dare say this
praise was given me immediately on the back of some unpardonable
solecism, whic