was an awkward sea, and the funnel seems of my opinion, for it
gives a complaining roar.
The wind blows stiffly from the Nor-East, the sea runs high, we
ship a deal of water, the night is dark and cold, and the shapeless
passengers lie about in melancholy bundles, as if they were sorted
out for the laundress; but for my own uncommercial part I cannot
pretend that I am much inconvenienced by any of these things. A
general howling, whistling, flopping, gurgling, and scooping, I am
aware of, and a general knocking about of Nature; but the
impressions I receive are very vague. In a sweet faint temper,
something like the smell of damaged oranges, I think I should feel
languidly benevolent if I had time. I have not time, because I am
under a curious compulsion to occupy myself with the Irish
melodies. ‘Rich and rare were the gems she wore,’ is the
particular melody to which I find myself devoted. I sing it to
myself in the most charming manner and with the greatest
expression. Now and then, I raise my head (I am sitting on the
hardest of wet seats, in the most uncomfortable of wet attitudes,
but I don’t mind it,) and notice that I am a whirling shuttlecock
between a fiery battledore of a lighthouse on the French coast and
a fiery battledore of a lighthouse on the English coast; but I
don’t notice it particularly, except to feel envenomed in my hatred
of Calais. Then I go on again, ‘Rich and rare were the ge-ems shee-
e-e wore, And a bright gold ring on her wa-and she bo-ore, But O
her beauty was fa-a-a-a-r beyond’ – I am particularly proud of my
execution here, when I become aware of another awkward shock from
the sea, and another protest from the funnel, and a fellow-creature
at the paddle-box more audibly indisposed than I think he need be –
‘Her sparkling gems, or snow-white wand, But O her beauty was fa-aa-
a-a-r beyond’ – another awkward one here, and the fellow-creature
with the umbrella down and picked up – ‘Her spa-a-rkling ge-ems, or
her Port! port! steady! steady! snow-white fellow-creature at the
paddle-box very selfishly audible, bump, roar, wash, white wand.’
As my execution of the Irish melodies partakes of my imperfect
perceptions of what is going on around me, so what is going on
around me becomes something else than what it is. The stokers open
the furnace doors below, to feed the fires, and I am again on the
box of the old Exeter Telegraph fast coach, and that is the light
of the for ever extinguished coach-lamps, and the gleam on the
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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
hatches and paddle-boxes is THEIR gleam on cottages and haystacks,
and the monotonous noise of the engines is the steady jingle of the
splendid team. Anon, the intermittent funnel roar of protest at
every violent roll, becomes the regular blast of a high pressure
engine, and I recognise the exceedingly explosive steamer in which
I ascended the Mississippi when the American civil war was not, and
when only its causes were. A fragment of mast on which the light
of a lantern falls, an end of rope, and a jerking block or so,
become suggestive of Franconi’s Circus at Paris where I shall be
this very night mayhap (for it must be morning now), and they dance
to the self-same time and tune as the trained steed, Black Raven.
What may be the speciality of these waves as they come rushing on,
I cannot desert the pressing demands made upon me by the gems she
wore, to inquire, but they are charged with something about
Robinson Crusoe, and I think it was in Yarmouth Roads that he first
went a seafaring and was near foundering (what a terrific sound
that word had for me when I was a boy!) in his first gale of wind.
Still, through all this, I must ask her (who WAS she I wonder!) for
the fiftieth time, and without ever stopping, Does she not fear to
stray, So lone and lovely through this bleak way, And are Erin’s
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