Page:The Englishwoman in America (IA englishwomaninam00birdrich).pdf/21

tons of letters and newspapers, which were consigned to the mail-room with incredible rapidity.

Then friends were abruptly dismissed—two guns were fired the lashings were cast off—the stars and stripes flaunted gaily from the 'fore—the captain and pilot took their places on the paddle-boxes—the bell rang—our huge paddle-wheels revolved, and, to use the words in which the same event was chronicled by the daily press, "The Cunard royal mail steamer Canada, Captain Stone, left the Mersey this morning for Boston and Halifax, conveying the usual mails; with one hundred and sixty-eight passengers, and a large cargo on freight."

It was an auspiciously commenced voyage as far as appearances went. The summer sun shone brightly the waves of the Mersey were crisp and foam-capped—and the fields of England had never worn a brighter green. The fleet of merchant-ships through which we passed was not without an interest. There were timber-ships, huge and square-sided, unmistakeably from Quebec or Miramichi—green high-sterned Dutch galliots—American ships with long black hulls and tall raking masts—and those far-famed "Black Ball" clippers, the Marco Polo and the Champion of the Seas,—in short, the ships of all nations, with their marked and distinguishing peculiarities. But the most interesting object of all was the screw troop-ship Himalaya, which was embarking the Scots Greys for the Crimea—that regiment which has since earned so glorious but fatal a celebrity on the bloody field of Balaklava.

It is to be supposed that to those who were crossing the Atlantic for the first time to the western hemisphere