Page:Dickens - A Child s History of England, 1900.djvu/639

Rh late, whether he was below in the hold, or on deck at the hatchway, or overhauling his cabin, nailing up pictures in it of the Blush Roses of England, and the Blue Belles of Scotland, and the female Shamrock of Ireland: of a certainty I heard John singing like a blackbird. We had room for twenty passengers. Our sailing advertisement was no sooner out than we might have taken these twenty times over. In entering our men, I and John (both together) picked them, and we entered none but good hands—as good as were to be found in that port. And so, in a good ship of the best build, well owned, well arranged, well officered, well manned, well found in all respects, we parted with our pilot at a quarter-past four o'clock in the afternoon of the seventh of March one thousand eight hundred and fifty-one, and stood with a fair wind out to sea.

It may be easily believed that up to that time I had had no leisure to be intimate with my passengers. The most of them were then in their berths sea-sick; however, in going among them, telling them what was good for them, persuading them not to be there, but to come up on deck and feel the breeze, and in rousing them with a joke, or a comfortable word, I made acquaintance with them, perhaps in a more friendly and confidential way from the first, than I might have done at the cabin table.

Of my passengers, I need only particularize just at present, a bright-eyed, blooming young wife who was going out to join her husband in California, taking with her their only child, a little girl three years old, whom he had never seen; a sedate young woman in black, some five years older (about thirty as I should say), who was going out to join a brother; and an old gentlemen, a good deal like a hawk if his eyes had been better and not so red, who was always talking, morning, noon, and night, about the gold discovery. But, whether he was making the voyage, thinking his old arms could dig for gold, or whether his speculation was to buy it, or to barter for it, or to cheat for it, or to snatch it anyhow from other people, was his secret. He kept his secret.

These three and the child were the soonest well. The child was a most engaging child, to be sure, and very fond of me; though I am bound to admit that John Steadiman and I were borne on her pretty little books in