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to play at hide and seek. I saw one stern-visaged gentleman tormented in this way till he looked ready to give the child its "final quietus."^[1] There were angry people who had lost their portmanteaus, and were ransacking the state-rooms in quest of them, and indolent people who lay on the sofas reading novels and chewing tobacco. Some gentleman, taking no heed of a printed notice, goes to the ladies' cabin to see if his wife is safe on board, and meets with a rebuff from the stewardess, who tells him that "gentlemen are not admitted," and, knowing that the sense, or, as he would say, the nonsense of the community is against him, he beats a reluctant retreat. Everybody seems to have lost somebody or something, but in an hour or two the ladies are deep in novels, the gentlemen in the morning papers, the children have quarrelled themselves to sleep, and the captain has gone to smoke by the funnel.

I sat on the slip of deck with a lady from Lake Superior, niece of the accomplished poetess Mrs. Hemans, and she tried to arouse me into admiration of the shore of Lake Ontario; but I confess that I was too much occupied with a race which we were running with the American steamer Maple-leaf, to look at the flat, gloomy, forest-fringed coast. There is an inherent love of the excitement of a race in all human beings—even old ladies are not exempt from it, if we may believe a story which I heard on the Mississippi. An old lady was