At the dock, the other day, the steamer arrived from Rock Ferry with a
countless multitude of little girls, in coarse blue gowns, who, as they
landed, formed in procession, and walked up the dock. These girls had
been taken from the workhouses and educated at a charity-school, and
would by and by be apprenticed as servants. I should not have conceived
it possible that so many children could have been collected together,
without a single trace of beauty or scarcely of intelligence in so much
as one individual; such mean, coarse, vulgar features and figures
betraying unmistakably a low origin, and ignorant and brutal parents.
They did not appear wicked, but only stupid, animal, and soulless. It
must require many generations of better life to wake the soul in them.
All America could not show the like.


August 22d.--A Captain Auld, an American, having died here yesterday, I
went with my clerk and an American shipmaster to take the inventory of
his effects. His boarding-house was in a mean street, an old dingy
house, with narrow entrance,--the class of boarding-house frequented by
mates of vessels, and inferior to those generally patronized by masters.
A fat elderly landlady, of respectable and honest aspect, and her
daughter, a pleasing young woman enough, received us, and ushered us into
the deceased's bedchamber. It was a dusky back room, plastered and
painted yellow; its one window looking into the very narrowest of
back-yards or courts, and out on a confused multitude of back buildings,
appertaining to other houses, most of them old, with rude chimneys of
wash-rooms and kitchens, the bricks of which seemed half loose.

The chattels of the dead man were contained in two trunks, a chest, a
sail-cloth bag, and a barrel, and consisted of clothing, suggesting a
thickset, middle-sized man; papers relative to ships and business, a