"ennui" from which lie really suffers tortures
into that fabulous British malady, "le spleen,"
would very soon ring for a brazier of charcoal
and a box of matches, hermetically close all the
doors and windows—the which is difficult in
this damp and windy country—and, without
further ado asphyxiate himself. The view of
the wet Boompps fails, somehow, to engulf me
in despondency. I like the man with the birch
broom, and I wonder how many stuyvers he gets
a day for washing the rain away. I fancy him
a kind of Low Country Ixion, condemned to
this labour for punitive reasons. I have read
old stories of vagrants in the Dutch Rasp-houses
sentenced to hard labour in a room where there
was a pump, and into which water was continually
flowing. If they did not pump it out, they
were drowned. I like the little Dutch boys who
come splashing along, with their bright violet
stockings and their clumping wooden shoes. I
admire the fubsy Dutch damsels who pass in
their multiplied yet abbreviated linsey-woolsey
skirts, and the thin plates of gold over their
banded hair, and neatly twilled caps, and
demure gorgets, and massy earrings. Surely these
Dutcli damsels can never want sweethearts, for
I calculate that, on a reasonable average, every
young woman has at least seven pounds ten-
worth of good substantial finery about her. I
like the Dutch young woman; though the
censorious may urge that her gait more intimately
resembles a waddle than a walk.

A traveller, even the most splenetic, has no
right to suffer from the spleen when he can see
ships. Now, on the Boompps this wet morning,
there are any number of ships. I will dismiss
the great flat-bottomed barges, heaped high from
stem to stern with cabbages, with onions, or
with the cannon-balls of peace—Dutch cheeses.
I will eliminate from my picture, the lumbering
tuylschuyts— omnibuses of the water,
which look like the lord mayor's barge grown
out of all shape, or the Bucentaur become
dropsical. Of schooners and brigantines, sails
and ferry-boats, clinging to the Boompps like
burrs to the band which is drawn through
a hedge, I will say nothing. But I cannot
spare you that great, deep-hulled, swelling-
sided three-master, the Waterstaat East Indiaman,
which is even now loading for Batavia,
and is to set sail to-morrow morning, they tell
me, for her spicy destination.

I love a ship. My heart leaps up, quite as
high as Mr. Wordsworth's when he beheld
the rainbow in the sky, when I think that
yonder great black mass pitched all over—
the ark which contains Shem, Ham, Japhet, and
their wives and families, and casks of beef and
pork, and preserved peas, and Bass's pale ale,
and a hold full of Manchester cotton goods,
prisoned by hydraulic pressure with shining iron
bauds, and pigs, and sheep, and poultry, and all
manner of creeping things— shall, with no
stronger assistance than that afforded by a few
poles and some tarred strings and some wet
towels, but with a trusty man at the helm, and a
master mariner who knows his Hamilton Moore
by heart, be wafted over the world—be spirited
from these dull misty Boompps to the huge hot
Javan region—to the land of infinite spices and
continual coffee groves, and where the very air
is sticky with sugar. How inadequate seems
even the biggest ship to contain a tithe even
of the things which you know to be stowed
away in her! Row round her, pace her
deck from stem to stern, view her near or
from afar off, and still you can with difficulty
persuade yourself that so much cargo, and
so many stores, and so many living souls—to
say nothing of the cow amidships, and the fowls
in the poultry-coop can be in reality packed
within her sides. It is all very well, when she
is a steamer, to be told that she gets lighter
every day, owing to the quantity of coals she
has burnt; but how did she get all those coals
into her bunkers, to begin with? It is all very
well to explain to me the theory of winds and
tides, and the mathematical laws of navigation;
but her sails and her masts, her captain and
her crew, her charts and her compasses and her
quadrants notwithstanding, she is not the less to
me a mystery of mysteries. However she does
get, anyhow, to her destination I know no more
than did the wisest man that ever lived. King
Solomon was fain to confess that, next to the way
of a fowl in the air and a serpent on a rod, the way
of a ship on the sea puzzled him most crucially.

Now, this enormous Waterstaat East Indiaman.
She looks as firmly planted at her moorings
as the Stadt House at Amsterdam on her
piles: yet to-morrow morning, when I take a
survey of the Boompps from my windows, I
shall find the Waterstaat clean gone— gone,
like the puff of smoke belched forth by a
cannon in a holiday salute. And she will reach
the shores of Java somehow, this unwieldy
monster, and, all unwieldy as she is, the waves
will make sport of her, and dandle her like an
infant, or send her spinning like a top, or see-
saw, like Margery Daw, and turn her all but
upside down. Eor my part I decline, in the
present mood of my mind, to believe in the
winds and tides, and Hamilton Moore's Navigation.
I prefer to believe in Neptune with
an attendant bevy of Tritons—hairy persons of
a salt savour, blowing lustily into enormous
conch-shells. I prefer to believe in Æolus
—have I not heard him playing upon a harp,
purchased at Cramer's, set outside my chamber
window? I prefer to believe that Boreas
is indeed a blustering railer. I prefer to
believe in the corporeal existence of those sirens
of the sea against whom the heathen man whom
Homer sang of, stopped his ears. I see the
sirens. They belong to the corps de ballet.
They have long back hair, which they let
down over their white shoulders. Goodness
gracious me! What a change has come over
the stage of my theatre! The Waterstaat East
Indiaman, the Boompps, the muddy river, all
fade away. I behold an ocean of painted canvas,
and behind some blue gauze waves are a bevy
of sirens, with their long back hair floating
over their white shoulders; and there, as I