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Cool, sir, was n't it? and I tried to be cool too, but I could n't; blood will boil: it's human nature, sir, and mine began singing in my ears like a kettle. Thought I, this must be vented somehow, or I shall burst a vessel; it's a dread of mine, sir, that some day I shall burst a vessel, if my passion is n't worked off, and between that and his grinning at me, I could n't help making a punch at the fellow's head: I could n't, upon my soul. That led to a scuffle, and the noise brought up the master and the garsoons; however, the end was, I got my bed and this beautiful black eye into the bargain, for the landlord soon proved my right to number seventeen. "And what excuse," I asked, "did the usurper offer for his intrusion?" "None in the world, sir. Not a syllable! except that the Skipper House happened to be full, and my bed happened to be empty. Confound his yellow face! — I thought it was jaundice, or the American fever, but it's brass, sir, brass lacker. But that's not the end. 'In course,' said he, 'you'll allow a half-naked individual about twenty minutes or so to make himself decent and collect his traps?' Well, sir, having vented my warmth, I was quite agreeable, and how do you think he spent the time?" Here another pause for the speaker to muster all his indignation. "Why, sir, when it came to fresh making the bed, he had wound and rolled up both the sheets into balls, hard balls, sir, as big as your head!”" “An old trick,” I remarked, "amongst nautical men, and called reefing." "Nothing more likely, sir,” said the red face; "he'd been thirty years at sea, you know, as he told me when he swindled me out of my sovereign. However, there were the two sheets, the only pair not in use, and the Devil himself could n't pick an end out of them, landlord, garsoons, and all. Renounce me if I don't believe they're in statu quo at this very moment, I do, upon my life!" The fervor with which he made this declaration quite upset my gravity: and he joined at first in my mirth, but stopped short as abruptly as if he had been seized by a spasm. "No, no, sir," he said, with a serious shake of the head, "the thing's beyond a laugh. It's my remark, sir, that I never took a strong dislike to a person at first sight without his giving me good reason for it in the end. Mark my words, sir, – that turmeric-faced Yankee is my evil genius. He'll haunt me and spoil my pleasure wherever I go.

He has poisoned the German Ocean for me already, and now, sir, he'll poison the river Rhine, he will, sir, as sure as my name's Bowker, John Bowker, he'll poison the Rhine, and the Baths, and the Hock wine, and everything, -as certain as I stand here!"

Absurd as this picture will seem to you, my dear Gerard, it is nevertheless sketched from nature. And, after all, how many of us there are who, in the pilgrimage of life, thus conjure up black, blue, or yellow-faced bugbears to poison our river Rhines! But, not to moralize, suppose me now driven, by a smart shower, into a rather noisy, very odoriferous, and piping-hot cabin, the rule against smoking having been reversed, by turning the prohibitory placards with their faces to the wall. Here I found my uncle good-humoredly playing, or rather trying to play, at dominoes with a German, the only difficulties being that the German and English games are as different as the two languages. Still they persevered with laudable patience, each after his own fashion, till they had finished two glasses apiece of curaçoa. "It is very extraordinary," remarked my uncle, as he rose up, neither winner nor loser, "that, in spite of the thousands and thousands of English who have passed up and down the Rhine. the natives have never yet learned to play at dominoes!"

A complaint from a country woman at the next table was quite in keeping. For some minutes past she had been calling out "Hoof! hoof! hoof!" to our squat little Dutchman of a garçon, who in return only grinned and shook his head. "It's really provoking," exclaimed the lady, "to have such a stupid waiter. He does n't even know the French for an egg!"

Our first stoppage was at Dordrecht, or Dort, a quaint, characteristic town, that looked like an old acquaintance, its features being such as are common on the pictorial Dutch tiles. Here, amongst other additions to our living freight, we obtained a private soldier, of whom his wife or sweetheart took a most affectionate leave-as of a house-lamb about to be butchered by "les braves Belges." Again, and again, and again, she called him back for more last words, and imprinted fresh editions, with additions, of her farewell, upon his lips, but the warning-bell of the steamer rang, fatal as curfew to the light of love, the weeping female gave her warrior one more

desperate hug, that almost lifted him off his feet; he tore himself from the arms that dropped listless, as if she had no further use for them in this world; the paddles revolved, and there on the quay, so long as Dordrecht remained in sight, we beheld the forlorn frow, gazing, as motionless and inanimate as one of the staring painted wooden dolls indigenous to her country. "Poor souls!" murmured my aunt, who had been looking on with glistening eyes; "what a horrid cruel thing is war, when it comes home to us!" My uncle, too, gave utterance to a thought which sounded like an echo of my own: "Egad, Frank, there was n't much Dutch phlegm in that!"

I was too much interested by this episode to notice the advent of another passenger, till he was announced in an angry whisper: "There he is again! Curse his yellow face!-I thought he was a day ahead of me!" And lo! the American stood boldly before us, having halted at Dordrecht to inspect the saw-mills, and the ponds for containing the huge rafts of timber that float thither down the Rhine, from Switzerland and the Black Forest. His old opponent glared at him fiercely with his sound eye, and very soon found fuel for the flame. The deck of a steamer is supposed to be divided amid-ships by an imaginary line, aft of which the steerage passengers are expected not to intrude. In the Rhenish vessels this trespass is forbidden, by sundry polyglott inscriptions, under penalty of paying the higher rate of passage; and the arrangement affords a curious test of character. A modest or timid individual, a lover of law and order, scrupulously refrains from passing across the boundary; another, of a careless, easy disposition, paces indifferently within or beyond the invisible fence; whilst a third fellow (ten to one he wears his hat all aslant) ostentatiously swaggers to the very stern, as if glorying that there is a privilege to usurp, and a rule to be broken. It was soon apparent to which of these classes our American belonged. "Look at him, sir," growled Mr. John Bowker, giving me a smart nudge with his elbow, "do look at him! He's a steerage passenger, and see where he is, confound his impudence! sitting on the skylight of the best cabin. Pray come here, sir;" and seizing me by the arm, he dragged me to the paddle-box, and pointed to the deck-regulations, conspicuously painted up in three different languages. "There, sir, read that;" but he kindly saved me the trouble, by reading aloud

"There's the law distinctly

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the English version of the rules. laid down, and yet that yellow scoundrel- He broke off abruptly, for the yellow scoundrel, himself attracted by our movements, came to see what we were looking at; deliberately read over the inscriptions in French, Dutch, and English, and then quietly resumed his seat on the skylight. "Cool, is n't it?" asked the chafing Bowker; "he can't say now he has had no warning. Renounce me, if I don't name it to the captain. I will, upon my life! What's to become of society, if we can't draw a line? Subversion of all order levelling all ranks; democracy let loose; anarchy, sir, anarchy, anarchy, anarchy!" Here his vehemence inciting him to physical action, he began to walk the deck, with something of the mien of a rampant red lion; but still serving up to me the concoctions of his wrath, hot and hot. "I suppose he calls that American independence! (A walk.) Sir, if I abominate anything in the world, it's a Yankee, let alone his yellow face. (Walk.) It's hereditary, sir. My worthy father, John Bowker, senior, could never abide them never! (Walk.) Sir, one day he met a ship captain, in the city, that wanted to know his way to the Minories. Says my father, 'I've an idea you 're an American.' 'I guess I am,' said the captain. 'And pray, sir,' said my worthy parent, what do you see in my face to make you think I'd tell a Yankee his way to the Minories, or anywhere else?' Yes, sir, he did upon my life. He was quite consistent in that! (Another walk, and then a full stop.) I suspect, sir, you think I am warm?" I could not help smiling an assent. "Well, sir, I know it. I am warm. It's my nature, and it's my principle to give nature her head. I've strong feelings, very; and I make a point never to balk them. For instance, if there's a color I detest, it's yellow. I hate it, sir, as a buffalo hates scarlet, and there's that Yankee with a yellow face, yellow eyes, yellow teeth, and a yellow waistcoat, renounce me, if I don't think he's yellow all through, ugh!" and with a grimace to match the grunt, he hurried off to the bows, as if to place the whole length of the vessel between himself and the object of his aversion. Still, with the true perversity of a self-tormentor, who will neither like things nor let them alone, he continued to watch every movement of his enemy, and was not slow in extracting fresh matter of offence. "I must go be

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low," he muttered as he again approached me; 66 it's an infernal bore, but I must! There's no standing him! I can't walk the same deck! It's forbidden to talk to the helm, and there he is drawling away to the steersman! Renounce me, if he is n't telling him the story of the rolled-up sheets, — I know it by his grinning! Sir, if I stay above, I shall have a fever, he'll change my whole mass of blood, he will, as sure as fate; and with a furious glance at the yellow face, down scrambled the peppery-tempered gentleman to cool his heat like Bowker, senior, "he was quite consistent in that " with a stiff glass of hot brandy and water.

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As you know, Gerard, I am not professedly a sentimental traveller, like Sterne, yet I could not help moralizing on what had passed. Mr. John Bowker seemed to me but a type of our partisans and bigots, political and religious, who take advantage of any colorable pretext on the palate of their prej udices, to shut their hearts against a fellow-creature who may wear green to their orange, or pink to their true blue. In short, Heaven knows how far I might have carried my reflections on the iniquity of hating a man for his yellow face, if I had not suddenly recollected that, ere now, many a human being has been stolen, enslaved, bought and sold, scourged, branded, and even murdered, merely because he happened to have a black one. Should you still require an apology for these extra ruminations, I must refer for my excuse to the sight of the fortress of Gorcum, where nineteen Catholic priests suffered death for the faith that was in them; and to a glimpse of the castle of Lowenstein, in which Grotius was imprisoned for his opinions, and reduced to compose his renowned treatise "De Jure Belli et Pacis," where he could neither be comfortably at peace, nor conveniently make war.

I have said that steaming up the lower Rhine is sufficiently tedious; and it was eight o'clock, P. M., ere we arrived at Nimeguen, a frontier town, chiefly remarkable as the place where the triple treaty was signed in 1678, between France, Holland, and Spain. It will interest you more to remember, that Sir Walter Scott spent a night here, on his last melancholy journey towards Abbotsford and his long home. There is a story current that the innkeepers eagerly sent their carriages to await the arrival of the steamer which conveyed so illustrious a personage, and that Sir Walter unconsciously availed him

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