Besides these stewards, there are others, who are known as deck stewards, who wait upon seasick passengers, who lie about the decks in various nooks, in pleasant weather, and who have their meals brought to them by these attentive fellows from the cabin table. It is one phase of seasickness that some of the sufferers get well enough to lie languidly about in the fresh, bracing air, and can eat certain viands they may fancy for the nonce, but upon entering the enclosed saloon, are at once, from the confined air or the more perceptible motion of the ship, afflicted with a most irrepressible and disagreeable nausea.
Well, the ticket for Liverpool is bought, your letter of credit prepared, and you are all ready for your first trip across the water. People that you know, who have been often, ask, in a _nonchalant_ style, what "boat" you are going "over" in; you thought it was a steamer, and the easy style with which they talk of running over for a few weeks, or should have gone this month, if they hadn't been so busy, or they shall probably see you in Vienna, or Rome, or St. Petersburg, causes you to think that this, to you, tremendous undertaking of a first voyage over the Atlantic is to be but an insignificant excursion, after all, and that the entire romance of the affair and the realizing of your imagination is to be dissolved like one of youth's castles in the air. So it seems as you ride down to the steamer, get on board, pushing amid the crowds of passengers and leave-taking friends; and not until a last, and perhaps, tearful leave-taking, and when the vessel fairly swings out into the stream, and you respond to the fluttering signal of dear ones on shore, till rapid receding renders face and form indistinguishable, do you realize that you are fairly launched on the great ocean, and friends and home are left behind, as they never have been before.
One's first experience upon the great, awful Ocean is never to be forgotten. My esteem for that great navigator, Christopher Columbus, has risen one hundred per cent. since I have crossed it, to think of the amount of courage, strength of mind, and faith it must have required to sustain him in his venturesome voyage in the frail and imperfect crafts which those of his day must have been.