When we left the wharf at New York last week, in the good steamship Tennessee, we were not conscious, at first, as we sat in the cabin, that she was in motion and proceeding down the harbor.  There was no beating or churning of the sea, no struggling to get forward; her paddles played in the water as smoothly as those of a terrapin, without jar or noise.  The Tennessee is one of the tightest and strongest boats that navigate our coast; the very flooring of her deck is composed of timbers instead of planks, and helps to keep her massive frame more compactly and solidly together.  It was her first voyage; her fifty-one passengers lolled on sofas fresh from the upholsterer’s, and slept on mattresses which had never been pressed by the human form before, in state-rooms where foul air had never collected.  Nor is it possible that the air should become impure in them to any great degree, for the Tennessee is the best-ventilated ship I ever was in; the main cabin and the state-rooms are connected with each other and with the deck, by numerous openings and pipes which keep up a constant circulation of air in every part.

I have spoken of the passengers as remarkably quiet persons.  Several of them, I believe, never spoke during the passage, at least so it seemed to me.  The silence would have been almost irksome, but for two lively little girls who amused us by their prattle, and two young women, apparently just married, too happy to do any thing but laugh, even when suffering from seasickness, and whom we now and then heard shouting and squealing from their state-rooms.  There were two dark-haired, long-limbed gentlemen, who lay the greater part of the first and second day at full length on the sofas in the after-cabin, each with a spittoon before him, chewing tobacco with great rapidity and industry, and apparently absorbed in the endeavor to fill it within a given time.  There was another, with that atrabilious complexion peculiar to marshy countries, and circles of a still deeper hue about his eyes, who sat on deck, speechless and motionless, wholly indifferent to the sound of the dinner-bell, his countenance fixed in an expression which seemed to indicate an utter disgust of life.

Yet we had some snatches of good talk on the voyage.  A robust old gentleman, a native of Norwalk, in Connecticut, told us that he had been reading a history of that place by the Rev. Mr. Hall.

“I find,” said he, “that in his account of the remarkable people of Norwalk, he has omitted to speak of two of the most remarkable, two spinsters, Sarah and Phebe Comstock, relatives of mine and friends of my youth, of whom I retain a vivid recollection.  They were in opulent circumstances for the neighborhood in which they lived, possessing a farm of about two hundred acres; they were industrious, frugal, and extremely charitable; but they never relieved a poor family without visiting it, and inquiring carefully into its circumstances.  Sarah was the housekeeper, and Phebe the farmer.  Phebe knew nothing of kitchen matters, but she knew at what time of the year greensward should be broken up, and corn planted, and potatoes dug.  She dropped Indian corn and sowed English grain with her own hands.  In the time of planting or of harvest, it was Sarah who visited and relieved the poor.