Saunterings | Page 5

denouement we cannot yet say. If it comes out
well, we ought to erect a monument to Christopher as high as the one at
Washington expects to be; and we presume it is well to fire a salute
occasionally to keep the ancient mariner in mind while we are trying
our great experiment. And this reminds me that he ought to have had a
naval salute.

There is something almost heroic in the idea of firing off guns for a
man who has been stone-dead for about four centuries. It must have had
a lively and festive sound in Boston, when the meaning of the salute
was explained. No one could hear those great guns without a quicker
beating of the heart in gratitude to the great discoverer who had made
Boston possible. We are trying to "realize" to ourselves the importance
of the 12th of October as an anniversary of our potential existence. If
any one wants to see how vivid is the gratitude to Columbus, let him
start out among our business-houses with a subscription-paper to raise
money for powder to be exploded in his honor. And yet Columbus was
a well-meaning man; and if he did not discover a perfect continent, he
found the only one that was left.
Columbus made voyaging on the Atlantic popular, and is responsible
for much of the delusion concerning it. Its great practical use in this fast
age is to give one an idea of distance and of monotony.
I have listened in my time with more or less pleasure to very rollicking
songs about the sea, the flashing brine, the spray and the tempest's roar,
the wet sheet and the flowing sea, a life on the ocean wave, and all the
rest of it. To paraphrase a land proverb, let me write the songs of the
sea, and I care not who goes to sea and sings 'em. A square yard of
solid ground is worth miles of the pitching, turbulent stuff. Its inability
to stand still for one second is the plague of it. To lie on deck when the
sun shines, and swing up and down, while the waves run hither and
thither and toss their white caps, is all well enough to lie in your narrow
berth and roll from side to side all night long; to walk uphill to your
state-room door, and, when you get there, find you have got to the
bottom of the hill, and opening the door is like lifting up a trap-door in
the floor; to deliberately start for some object, and, before you know it,
to be flung against it like a bag of sand; to attempt to sit down on your
sofa, and find you are sitting up; to slip and slide and grasp at
everything within reach, and to meet everybody leaning and walking on
a slant, as if a heavy wind were blowing, and the laws of gravitation
were reversed; to lie in your berth, and hear all the dishes on the
cabin-table go sousing off against the wall in a general smash; to sit at
table holding your soup-plate with one hand, and watching for a chance
to put your spoon in when it comes high tide on your side of the dish;
to vigilantly watch, the lurch of the heavy dishes while holding your

glass and your plate and your knife and fork, and not to notice it when
Brown, who sits next you, gets the whole swash of the gravy from the
roast-beef dish on his light-colored pantaloons, and see the look of
dismay that only Brown can assume on such an occasion; to see Mrs.
Brown advance to the table, suddenly stop and hesitate, two waiters
rush at her, with whom she struggles wildly, only to go down in a heap
with them in the opposite corner; to see her partially recover, but only
to shoot back again through her state-room door, and be seen no
more;--all this is quite pleasant and refreshing if you are tired of land,
but you get quite enough of it in a couple of weeks. You become, in
time, even a little tired of the Jew who goes about wishing "he vas a
veek older;" and the eccentric man, who looks at no one, and streaks
about the cabin and on deck, without any purpose, and plays
shuffle-board alone, always beating himself, and goes on the deck
occasionally through the sky-light instead of by the cabin door, washes
himself at the salt-water pump, and won't sleep in his state-room,
saying he is n't used to sleeping in a bed,--as if the hard narrow, uneasy
shelf of a berth was anything like a bed!--and you have heard at last
pretty nearly all about the officers, and their twenty and thirty