CHAPTER III.

All day Sunday at anchor. The storm had gone down a great deal, but the

sea had not. It was still piling its frothy hills high in air "outside,"

as we could plainly see with the glasses. We could not properly begin a

pleasure excursion on Sunday; we could not offer untried stomachs to so

pitiless a sea as that. We must lie still till Monday. And we did. But

we had repetitions of church and prayer-meetings; and so, of course, we

were just as eligibly situated as we could have been any where.

I was up early that Sabbath morning and was early to breakfast. I felt a

perfectly natural desire to have a good, long, unprejudiced look at the

passengers at a time when they should be free from self-consciousness

-which is at breakfast, when such a moment occurs in the lives of human

beings at all.

I was greatly surprised to see so many elderly people--I might almost

say, so many venerable people. A glance at the long lines of heads was

apt to make one think it was all gray. But it was not. There was a

tolerably fair sprinkling of young folks, and another fair sprinkling of

gentlemen and ladies who were non-committal as to age, being neither

actually old or absolutely young.

The next morning we weighed anchor and went to sea. It was a great

happiness to get away after this dragging, dispiriting delay. I thought

there never was such gladness in the air before, such brightness in the

The Innocents Abroad