t, perhaps the season is bad or his boat has been unlucky,
and after fifty hours' unsleeping vigilance and toil, not a shop will
give him credit for a loaf of bread. Yet the steerage of the emigrant
ship had been too vile for the endurance of a man thus rudely trained.
He had scarce eaten since he came on board, until the day before, when
his appetite was tempted by some excellent pea-soup. We were all much of
the same mind on board, and beginning with myself, had dined upon
pea-soup not wisely but too well; only with him the excess had been
punished, perhaps because he was weakened by former abstinence, and his
first meal had resulted in a cramp. He had determined to live henceforth
on biscuit; and when, two months later, he should return to England, to
make the passage by saloon. The second cabin, after due inquiry, he
scouted as another edition of the steerage.

He spoke apologetically of his emotion when ill. "Ye see, I had no call
to be here," said he; "and I thought it was by with me last night. I've
a good house at home, and plenty to nurse me, and I had no real call to
leave them." Speaking of the attentions he had received from his
shipmates generally, "They were all so kind," he said, "that there's
none to mention." And except in so far as I might share in this, he
troubled me with no reference to my services.

But what affected me in the most lively manner was the wealth of this
day-labourer, paying a two months' pleasure visit to the States, and
preparing to return in the saloon, and the new testimony rendered by his
story, not so much to the horrors of the steerage as to the habitual
comfort of the working classes. One foggy, frosty December evening, I
encountered on Liberton Hill, near Edinburgh, an Irish labourer trudging
homeward from the fields. Our roads lay together, and it was natural
that we should fall into talk. He was covered with mud; an inoffensive,
ignorant creature, who thought the Atlantic cable was a secret
contrivance of the masters the better to oppress labouring mankind; and
I confess I was astonished to learn that he had nearly three hundred
pounds in the bank. But this man had travelled over most of the world,
and enjoyed wonderful opportunities on some American railroad, with two
dollars a shift and double pay on Sunday and at night; whereas my
fellow-passenger had never quitted Tyneside, and had made all that he
possessed in that same accursed, down-falling England, whence skilled
m