Page:The Amateur Emigrant-The Silverado Squatters.djvu/11

Rh risk his life or health to serve another. Yet he never succeeded in wholly subduing the "old Adam" within him. Meanness or falsity or cruelty set his eyes blazing, and his language on such occasions became far from parliamentary. Naturally his first visit to America, a land without class distinctions, was to him an event of extraordinary interest. The privations he endured as an amateur emigrant caused him much less suffering than his friends, who could not imagine themselves in a similar position, supposed. It was not the first time he had associated with the working-man on terms of equality; nor did it occur to him that it was a condescension on his part to join with his fellow-passengers in their attempts to make the time pass pleasantly, or to do for them what little kindly offices came in his way. One thing he did resent with bitterness—the visits of the first-class passengers, who came out of curiosity into the steerage, looking about as though they were passing through a menagerie. He never forgave "your wife, my good man?" "Why," he would ask, "should I be her good man any more than she my good woman? Her question, and manner of putting it, made me understand a great many things." I remember, when we were living in Hyères, his receiving a letter from England that enclosed a