Page:Works of Jules Verne - Parke - Vol 7.djvu/48

28 ins, and even the lunch bell failed to awaken the slumberers, worn out by sea-sickness. About noon Captain Anderson ordered sail to be hoisted, so that the ship, better supported, did not roll so much.

spite of the ship's disorderly conduct, life on board was becoming organized, for which the Anglo-Saxon nothing is more simple. The steamboat is his street and his house for the time being; the Frenchman, on the contrary, always looks like a traveler.

When the weather was favorable, the boulevards were thronged with promenaders, who managed to maintain the perpendicular, in spite of the ship's motion, but with the peculiar gyrations of tipsy men. When the passengers did not go on deck, they remained either in their private sitting-rooms or in the grand saloon, and then began the noisy discords of pianos, all played at the same time, which, however, seemed not to affect Saxon ears in the least. Among these amateurs, I noticed a tall, bony woman, who must have been a good musician, for, in order to facilitate reading her piece of music, she had marked all the notes with a number, and the piano keys with a number corresponding, so that if it was note twenty-seven she struck key twenty-seven; if fifty-three, key fifty-three, and so on, perfectly indifferent to the noise around her, or the sound of other pianos in the adjoining saloons, and her equanimity was not even disturbed when some disagreeable little children thumped with their fists on the unoccupied keys.

Whilst this concert was going on, a bystander would carelessly take up one of the books scattered here and there on the tables, and, having found an interesting passage, would read it aloud, whilst his audience listened good humoredly, and complimented him with a flattering murmur of applause. Newspapers were scattered on the sofas, generally American and English, which always look old, although the pages have never been cut; it is a very tiresome operation reading these great sheets, which take up so much room, but the fashion being to leave them uncut, so they remain. One