Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/125

122 from their paradise, the dinner-table. The servants were incompetent, and the bedding was deficient and in the morning we bad no place for washing, no dressing-room but this cluttered, comfortless apartment We all felt a malignant pleasure in baring these annoyances to fret about in an English dominion. Even they cannot beguile Dame Comfort to sea—like a sensible woman, she is a stayer-at-home, a lover of the fireside. The English go in troops and caravans to Germany and Switzerland for the summer, and most of our fellow-passengers seemed to be of these gentry, travelling for pleasure. How different from the miscellaneous crowd of an American steamer! There is here more conventional breeding, not more civility, than with us.

When I went on deck in the morning we had entered the Scheldt, and poor M., with her eyes half open, was dutifully trying to sketch the shores. They are so low and uniform that a single horizontal stroke of her pencil would suffice to give you at home all the idea we got; and, for a fac-simile of the architecture, you may buy a Dutch town at Werckmeister's toyshop.

We now, for the first, realize that we are in a foreign land, and feel our distance from home. In our memory and feeling England blends with our own country.

We entered into the court of the Hotel St.