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Let us average the ages of the Quaker City's pilgrims and set the
figure down as fifty years. Is any man insane enough to imagine
that this picnic of patriarchs sang, made love, danced, laughed,
told anecdotes, dealt in ungodly levity? In my experience they
sinned little in these matters. No doubt it was presumed here at
home that these frolicsome veterans laughed and sang and romped all
day, and day after day, and kept up a noisy excitement from one end
of the ship to the other; and that they played blind-man's buff or
danced quadrilles and waltzes on moonlight evenings on the
quarter-deck; and that at odd moments of unoccupied time they jotted
a laconic item or two in the journals they opened on such an
elaborate plan when they left home, and then skurried off to their
whist and euchre labors under the cabin lamps. If these things were
presumed, the presumption was at fault. The venerable excursionists
were not gay and frisky. They played no blind-man's buff; they
dealt not in whist; they shirked not the irksome journal, for alas!
most of them were even writing books. They never romped, they
talked but little, they never sang, save in the nightly
prayer-meeting. The pleasure ship was a synagogue, and the pleasure
trip was a funeral excursion without a corpse. (There is nothing
exhilarating about a funeral excursion without a corpse.) A free,
hearty laugh was a sound that was not heard oftener than once in
seven days about those decks or in those cabins, and when it was
heard it met with precious little sympathy. The excursionists
danced, on three separate evenings, long, long ago, (it seems an
age.) quadrilles, of a single set, made up of three ladies and five
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