them from the carriage a small paper of sweet cakes (nothing is prettier
than to see a pretty woman eating sweet biscuits) and a bottle that
evidently contains Malmsey madeira. How daintily they sip it; how happy
they seem; how that lucky rogue of an Irishman prattles away! Yonder
is a noble group indeed: an English gentleman and his family. Children,
mother, grandmother, grown-up daughters, father, and domestics,
twenty-two in all. They have a table to themselves on the deck, and the
consumption of eatables among them is really endless. The nurses have
been bustling to and fro, and bringing, first, slices of cake; then
dinner; then tea with huge family jugs of milk; and the little people
have been playing hide-and-seek round the deck, coquetting with the
other children, and making friends of every soul on board. I love to
see the kind eyes of women fondly watching them as they gambol about; a
female face, be it ever so plain, when occupied in regarding children,
becomes celestial almost, and a man can hardly fail to be good and happy
while he is looking on at such sights. "Ah, sir!" says a great big man,
whom you would not accuse of sentiment, "I have a couple of those little
things at home;" and he stops and heaves a great big sigh and swallows
down a half-tumbler of cold something and water. We know what the honest
fellow means well enough. He is saying to himself, "God bless my girls
and their mother!" but, being a Briton, is too manly to speak out in a
more intelligible way. Perhaps it is as well for him to be quiet, and
not chatter and gesticulate like those Frenchmen a few yards from him,
who are chirping over a bottle of champagne.

There is, as you may fancy, a number of such groups on the deck, and
a pleasant occupation it is for a lonely man to watch them and build
theories upon them, and examine those two personages seated cheek by
jowl. One is an English youth, travelling for the first time, who has
been hard at his Guidebook during the whole journey. He has a "Manuel du