CHAPTER XI.

BACK TO ENGLAND.—CANADIAN HOSPITALITY.—THE ASSYRIAN MONARCH.—HOME.

My time was up, and I had to be off, after we got a look at pleasant London in the wood, as my Canadian friends who have been to England call it. I came back from Chicago to New York, and had again to encounter the horrors of nights in a Pullman sleeping-car. Why cannot the railway authorities separate the part of the car devoted to the gentlemen from that part inhabited by the ladies? The way in which the sexes are mixed up at night is, to say the least, unpleasant. I shall never forget my last experience in a Pullman sleeping-car. An ancient dame with blue spectacles, my _vis-à-vis_, as the shades of evening came on, gave me the horrors. In my despair I began undressing, thinking that the outraged female would rush away in disgust. Alas! she had stronger nerves than I calculated, and there she sat gazing serenely with her tinted orbs till I plunged myself behind my curtained berth, to encounter, early in the morning, once more those eyes.

New York and Boston are full of fairy forms. Why don’t they travel? The change would be pleasant for sore eyes like mine.

No wonder I sat all that night thinking of the great kindness I had received in Canada, and regretting especially that I had refused an invitation to dine that evening at the home of one of the leading barristers of Toronto, to meet some clergymen there who were familiar with my name, and who wished to meet me.

Surely I did wrong to leave Toronto, with all its friendly faces and kindly hearts. It will be long ere I cease to remember how the Canadians made me at home, as I met them on the rail, or on the boat, or in the hotel.

Said a London Evangelist to me: ‘You will find the Canadians a cold people, who will show you no hospitality. While I was there not one of them invited me to have a cup of tea.’

All I can say is, I found the Canadians quite the reverse. But then my friend went on a mission, and is a man of very serious views, while I travelled merely to see a land of whose wonders I had heard much, to talk to sinners as well as saints, and to learn from them what I could.

I was a great reformer once myself, and had glorious visions which never came to pass. In youth we have all such dreams. Now, as the days darken round me and the years, I seek to put up with the shortcomings of my brother-man, trusting that he in his Christian charity may extend a similar forbearance to my own.

I came back in the _Assyrian Monarch_. I was glad I did so. That fine ship has a distinguished record. It has carried no end of theatricals to New York; it did the same kind office for Jumbo: it carried troops and horses to Egypt; and when we English undertook to punish Arabi, it was a home for the refugees for a while.

Perhaps we have no ship more noticeable than the _Assyrian Monarch_, belonging to the Monarch Line, which runs weekly, I fancy, between New York and London.

It is a great treat in the fine weather to take that route. You are a little longer at sea—you glide along the south coast till you reach the Scilly Isles, and the ships of the company are all that can be desired.

It is a great deal of trouble and expense to some to go with all their goods and chattels to Liverpool, then unpack them, and get them down to the landing-stage, and then repack them in one or other of the far-famed steamers of that busy spot, and all this you save if you patronize the ships of the Monarch Line, which carry chiefly cargo, with a few saloon passengers as well.

We had a very heavy cargo on board the _Assyrian Monarch_ as we came back from New York. We carried 260 bullocks, besides cheese and grain, to make glad the heart and fill the stomach, and thus one felt that if the screw were to fail or the fog to hinder a rapid transit, there was corn in Egypt, and that there was something to fall back on. Happily, we were not driven to that alternative. We fared well in the saloon of the _Assyrian Monarch_; so well, indeed, that a poor elderly lady, who seemed at death’s door when we started, became quite vigorous, comparatively speaking, by the time we ended our voyage.

We had more freedom in the way of sitting up late and having lights than is possible in a crowded passenger ship, and we came more into contact with the captain of the ship and his merry men.

In the case of the _Assyrian Monarch_ this was a great advantage, as Captain Harrison is a good companion as well as an able navigator, and I felt myself safe in his hands, that is, as far as anyone can be safe at sea.

Further, I felt that the chances were in my favour. The _Assyrian Monarch_ had carried over the Atlantic, in stormy weather, the highly-respected and ever-to-be-regretted by Londoners Jumbo; surely it could be trusted to perform the same kind office for myself in the summer season, when the air is still and the seas are calm; and so it did, though every now and then we encountered that greatest of all dangers at sea, fog, more or less dense, especially on the Banks of Newfoundland, where the ice-laden waters of the Arctic come in contact with the warmer waves of the Gulf Stream. As our course was very fortunately much to the south, we had a good deal of the latter.

That Gulf Stream was a revelation to me. When I took my morning bath it seemed as if I were in warm water, and the new forms of life it fostered and developed were particularly pleasant to a casual observer like myself. There one could see the nautilus, or the Portugeuse man-of-war, as it is familiarly termed, in the language of the poet,

‘Put out a tier of oars on either side, Spread to the wafting breeze a twofold sail,’

and cruel, big-headed sharks, which, indeed, followed us almost all the way to England (the fact is that now, when so many cattle are thrown overboard, the Atlantic abounds with sharks), and lovely flying-fish like streaks of silver flashing along the deep and boundless blue ocean. Of these latter one flew on board. It met with a cruel fate. It was eaten by the first officer of the _Assyrian Monarch_ for breakfast. It ought to have choked him. It did nothing of the kind; he, hardened sinner that he was, enjoyed it greatly, and said that it was as good as a whiting.

In the Gulf Stream we found the usual number of whales and porpoises. The latter would play around the bow or race along the side of the ship in considerable quantities of all sorts of sizes. There were other fish of which I know not the names to be seen occasionally leaping out of the water as high and repeatedly as possible, as if a shark were in their midst seeking whom he might devour.

One sight I shall never forget in the Gulf Stream. It was that of a tortoise. I was leaning over the ship’s side, when something big and round seemed to be coming to the surface. I could not make out what it was; then all at once the truth flashed upon me as he wobbled along, paddling with his fins, his head erect, his little eyes peering at the ship as if he wondered what the dickens it was, and what business it had there. He seemed to be treading the water.

‘I saw him but a moment, But methinks I see him now.’

The sight gave me quite an appetite, though my friend Sir Henry Thompson will insist upon it that turtle soup is made of conger-eel, but in the wide Atlantic one has time to think of such things; day by day passes and you see nothing but the ocean—not even a distant sail, or the smoke of a passing steamer.

People complain of the uneventfulness of life on board a ship. That, however, is a matter of great thankfulness. A collision or a shipwreck are exciting, but they are disagreeable, nevertheless. It seems the homeward voyage is always the pleasantest as far as the sea is concerned, the wind being more frequently in the west than in any other quarter. Perhaps that is one reason why the Americans are so ready to cross the Atlantic. When I left New York, Cook’s office, in the Broadway, was full of tourists, including Mrs. Langtry and other distinguished personages. Mr. John Cook seems as popular in New York as he is elsewhere. Indeed, I was confidentially informed that he was engaged in organizing a personally-conducted tour for the relief of Gordon and the capture of the Mahdi, and I hear from Egypt that he has a chance of being made Khedive, a position which I am certain he would fill with credit to himself and advantage to the people. Of course, there is a little exaggeration in this, but the American tourist has good reason to revere the name of Cook, and so have we all. As much as anyone he has promoted travel between the Old World and the New, and has made us better friends. It is to be hoped that every steamer that crosses the Atlantic does something similar.

I must own, however, that the nearer I approached England the more I felt ashamed of my native land. The weather was villainous. It rained every day, and the worst of it was, I had had the audacity to assure the Americans on board that we had dry weather in England, that occasionally we saw the sun, and that we were not a web-footed race. Fortunately, at the time of writing this I have not yet encountered any of my American friends, or I should feel, as they say, uncommonly mean. However, the weather was fine enough to admit of a good look at Bishop’s Rock, the name of the lighthouse at the Scilly Isles, where we got our first sight of land; you can imagine how we all rushed on deck to see that. In fine weather, I say, by all means return from America in one of the fine, steady, well-built ships of the Monarch Line. The scenery is far finer than that offered by Queenstown and Liverpool. You have the Scilly Isles to look at, and the Land’s End, and the Lizards. At Portland Bill we laid off till a pilot came on board, and we had a good look at the establishment where so many smart men are sent for a season, and Weymouth heading the distant bay; and then what a fine sweep you have up the Channel—crowded with craft of all kinds, from the eight thousand ton steamer to the frail and awkward fishing lugger—and round the Nore; whilst old towns and castles, speaking not alone of the living present, but of the dead and buried past, are to be seen. Even Americans, fond as they are of modern life, feel the charm of that; whilst to the returning traveller the landscape speaks of ‘home, sweet home.’