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Show CHARACTERS ON SHIPBOARD. There are two hundred of us, and as many more were turned away for lack of space. The tourist's cry is the French cry of 1870 - "a Berlin!" Of course, in this large ship's company an observer can find many types. I notice: Two young people whom I take to be bride and groom ??? signs chiefly the fact that the ??? plums out of a fancy box with ??? on the lid. A party of bicyclists ??? Boston, I judge; at least one of ??? passes his time very profitably in reading Emerson's essays. The passenger who walks. He has estimated the length of a clear space on the deck, and does his "laps" at stated times. An Italian, who reads a copy of La Liberta assiduously, looking up with a pleased expression, however, when a lady plays Veridian? Melodies on the piano in the saloon. An invalid with a hacking cough that suggests a coffin-hack. A beauty, one who has been a beauty for, I fear, these many years. Ah, time, intrepid time, that ever advances and never retreats! The poor lady seeks to preserve her charms, as we do timber, by judicious coats of paint, but she must find a better ruse than ceruse if she is to deceive us longer. Another beauty; an honest one. Alas! She exemplifies the Japanese proverb: "The beautiful woman is unhappy." She ate a salad at lunch, and now she is pouring oil on the troubled waters. By her side, another passenger by rail. I asked him as I passed what was up. "My dinner," was the laconic response. Ah, this sea sickness! It is like love-sickness in many particulars. Both maladies are common to man; both are very violent, uncomfortable, transcient and ludicrous, first to the victim's friends, and soon after to the sufferer himself. But to resume: The card-player playing whist, the game that five play at, four holding the cards and the fifth looking your shoulder and asking, why in the world did you play this and didn't play that? But cards are a good game, of great antiquity and biblical associations. Yes, and their sinful tricks date back to the prophets, for we read in Isaiah xxiv., 16, that "the treacherous dealers have dealt treacherously." Still, what would whist be without its tricks? A party of actors, most of them boisterously well, but one so sick that I hear he has thrown up all his engagements. The man with an appetite like the sarraconia?. The purser regards him ruefully, and his table neighbors with admiration, not unmixed with awe. A cry-baby. Stanley tells of a snake in Africa so deadly that when it appears in the village the village moves off. So when that child appears the adjacent passengers gather up chairs, wraps and books and leave. A young man starting out to see the world, meaning more particularly thereby, the flesh and the devil. He wants to see "life," and will pay for his entertainment in the wages of sin, which is death. A few pretty children tumbling about the decks in a very tipsy manner, and evidently happy. The little dears; much they know about going to sea or the nature of things! Oooo, when in mid-Pacific, the dismal news came that our steamship had broken her crank-pin. There was grumbling and grieving, in the midst of which a little maid felt in her pinafore and said: "No matter, mother, I've got a pin I'll give the captain!" - New York Post |