women,
and sets would be formed which would vie with each other in rendering themselves disagreeably conspicuous.
To the refined and sensitive, such an infliction, from which there was no escape for days and weeks, was torture. Of all the miseries I ever experienced on shipboard, sea-sickness, tempest, filth, and fever included, by far the worst has been the crowd, among whom were always some supremely disgusting per- sons whose presence one could not escape. Many a hateful face haunted me long after I had left the ship. But such of course were exceptions ; b}^ far the greater part of the emigrants were quiet, orderly, and well behaved, and many of them courteous, gentle- manly, and self-sacrificing under the most trying circumstances.
To cite one example. When the steamer Central America went down off Cape Hatteras, with five or six hundred homeward bound Californians, it was the theme of thousands throughout Christendom how nobly they behaved, how they chivalrously filled the boats with women and children, and then how bravely and unflinchingly they died. No company of cour- tiers, no band of martyrs, no regiment of soldiers trained to look indifferently on death, could have more calmly faced an awful fate than did these young and ardent adventurers picked from every nationality. They were men!
No man knows himself, much less his neighbor, until he has made a voyage in an over-crowded ship in hot weather. One is hungry without an appetite, oppressed with thirst that water will not quench ; one is stimulated by ocean oxygen, nauseated by steamer smells ; a prickly heat breaks out over the body, and the mind becomes feverish and fretful. Hence it is that latent characteristics, of which the possessor himself was not conscious, are developed. General traits are intensified or obliterated; the mean man becomes meaner, the hitherto ofood-hearted and frank may become angelic, or fall into the de
