last a little toy sky-rocket is flashed up from it; and, even as
that small streak in the darkness dies away, we are telegraphed to
Queenstown, Liverpool, and London, and back again under the ocean
to America.
Then up come the half-dozen passengers who are going ashore at
Queenstown and up comes the mail-agent in charge of the bags, and
up come the men who are to carry the bags into the mail-tender that
will come off for them out of the harbour. Lamps and lanterns
gleam here and there about the decks, and impeding bulks are
knocked away with handspikes; and the port-side bulwark, barren but
a moment ago, bursts into a crop of heads of seamen, stewards, and
engineers.
The light begins to be gained upon, begins to be alongside, begins
to be left astern. More rockets, and, between us and the land,
steams beautifully the Inman steamship City of Paris, for New York,
outward bound. We observe with complacency that the wind is dead
against her (it being WITH us), and that she rolls and pitches.
(The sickest passenger on board is the most delighted by this
circumstance.) Time rushes by as we rush on; and now we see the
light in Queenstown Harbour, and now the lights of the mail-tender
coming out to us. What vagaries the mail-tender performs on the
way, in every point of the compass, especially in those where she
has no business, and why she performs them, Heaven only knows! At
length she is seen plunging within a cable’s length of our port
broadside, and is being roared at through our speaking-trumpets to
do this thing, and not to do that, and to stand by the other, as if
she were a very demented tender indeed. Then, we slackening amidst
a deafening roar of steam, this much-abused tender is made fast to
us by hawsers, and the men in readiness carry the bags aboard, and
return for more, bending under their burdens, and looking just like
the pasteboard figures of the miller and his men in the theatre of
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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
our boyhood, and comporting themselves almost as unsteadily. All
the while the unfortunate tender plunges high and low, and is
roared at. Then the Queenstown passengers are put on board of her,
with infinite plunging and roaring, and the tender gets heaved up
on the sea to that surprising extent that she looks within an ace
of washing aboard of us, high and dry. Roared at with contumely to
the last, this wretched tender is at length let go, with a final
plunge of great ignominy, and falls spinning into our wake.
The voice of conscience resumed its dominion as the day climbed up
the sky, and kept by all of us passengers into port; kept by us as
we passed other lighthouses, and dangerous islands off the coast,
where some of the officers, with whom I stood my watch, had gone
ashore in sailing-ships in fogs (and of which by that token they
seemed to have quite an affectionate remembrance), and past the
Welsh coast, and past the Cheshire coast, and past everything and
everywhere lying between our ship and her own special dock in the
Mersey. Off which, at last, at nine of the clock, on a fair
evening early in May, we stopped, and the voice ceased. A very
curious sensation, not unlike having my own ears stopped, ensued
upon that silence; and it was with a no less curious sensation that
I went over the side of the good Cunard ship ‘Russia’ (whom
prosperity attend through all her voyages!) and surveyed the outer
hull of the gracious monster that the voice had inhabited. So,
perhaps, shall we all, in the spirit, one day survey the frame that
held the busier voice from which my vagrant fancy derived this
similitude.
CHAPTER XXXII – A SMALL STAR IN THE EAST
I had been looking, yesternight, through the famous ‘Dance of
Death,’ and to-day the grim old woodcuts arose in my mind with the
new significance of a ghastly monotony not to be found in the
original. The weird skeleton rattled along the streets before me,