LIFE IN THE OPEN AIR.
CHAPTER I.
OFF.
At five P. M. we found ourselves—Iglesias, a party of friends, and myself—on board the Isaac Newton, a great, ugly, three-tiered box that walks the North River, like a laboratory of greasy odors.
In this stately cinder-mill were American citizens. Not to discuss spitting, which is for spittoons, not literature, our fellow-travellers on the deck of the "floating palace" were passably endurable people in looks, style, and language. I dodge discrimination, and characterize them en masse by negations. The passengers of the Isaac Newton, on a certain evening of July, 18—, were not so intrusively green and so gasping as Britons, not so ill-dressed and pretentious as Gauls, not so ardently futile and so lubberly as Germans. Such were the negative virtues of our fellow-citizen travellers; and base would it be to exhibit their positive vices.
And so no more of passengers or passage. I will not describe our evening on the river. Alas for the duty of straightforwardness and dramatic
