people are not wanting who whisper that he drinks too hard.
I understand he drives a hackney-coach, though how he does it,
unless he stands on the footboard behind, and lies along the roof
upon his chest, with his chin in the box, it would be difficult to
comprehend. He brought his gun with him, as a curiosity.
Christened ‘The Little Rifle,’ and displayed outside a shop-window,
it would make the fortune of any retail business in Holborn. When
he had shown himself and talked a little while, he withdrew with
his pocket-instrument, and went bobbing down the cabin, among men
of six feet high and upwards, like a light-house walking among
lamp-posts.
Within a few minutes afterwards, we were out of the canal, and in
the Ohio river again.
The arrangements of the boat were like those of the Messenger, and
the passengers were of the same order of people. We fed at the
same times, on the same kind of viands, in the same dull manner,
and with the same observances. The company appeared to be
oppressed by the same tremendous concealments, and had as little
capacity of enjoyment or light-heartedness. I never in my life did
see such listless, heavy dulness as brooded over these meals: the
very recollection of it weighs me down, and makes me, for the
moment, wretched. Reading and writing on my knee, in our little
cabin, I really dreaded the coming of the hour that summoned us to
table; and was as glad to escape from it again, as if it had been a
penance or a punishment. Healthy cheerfulness and good spirits
forming a part of the banquet, I could soak my crusts in the
fountain with Le Sage’s strolling player, and revel in their glad
enjoyment: but sitting down with so many fellow-animals to ward
off thirst and hunger as a business; to empty, each creature, his
Yahoo’s trough as quickly as he can, and then slink sullenly away;
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to have these social sacraments stripped of everything but the mere
greedy satisfaction of the natural cravings; goes so against the
grain with me, that I seriously believe the recollection of these
funeral feasts will be a waking nightmare to me all my life.
There was some relief in this boat, too, which there had not been
in the other, for the captain (a blunt, good-natured fellow) had
his handsome wife with him, who was disposed to be lively and
agreeable, as were a few other lady-passengers who had their seats
about us at the same end of the table. But nothing could have made
head against the depressing influence of the general body. There
was a magnetism of dulness in them which would have beaten down the
most facetious companion that the earth ever knew. A jest would
have been a crime, and a smile would have faded into a grinning
horror. Such deadly, leaden people; such systematic plodding,
weary, insupportable heaviness; such a mass of animated indigestion
in respect of all that was genial, jovial, frank, social, or
hearty; never, sure, was brought together elsewhere since the world
began.
Nor was the scenery, as we approached the junction of the Ohio and
Mississippi rivers, at all inspiriting in its influence. The trees
were stunted in their growth; the banks were low and flat; the
settlements and log cabins fewer in number: their inhabitants more
wan and wretched than any we had encountered yet. No songs of
birds were in the air, no pleasant scents, no moving lights and
shadows from swift passing clouds. Hour after hour, the changeless
glare of the hot, unwinking sky, shone upon the same monotonous
objects. Hour after hour, the river rolled along, as wearily and
slowly as the time itself.
At length, upon the morning of the third day, we arrived at a spot
so much more desolate than any we had yet beheld, that the
forlornest places we had passed, were, in comparison with it, full
of interest. At the junction of the two rivers, on ground so flat
and low and marshy, that at certain seasons of the year it is
inundated to the house-tops, lies a breeding-place of fever, ague,