However, I wouldn’t have it other than it is.  Lurindy, she lives at home the most of the time; and once in a while, when Stephen and mother and I and she are all together, and as gay as larks, and the baby is creeping round, swallowing pins and hooks and eyes as if they were blueberries, and the fire is burning, and the kettle singing, and the hearth swept clean, it seems as if heaven had actually come down, or we’d all gone up without waiting for our robes; it seems as if it was altogether too much happiness for one family.  And I’ve made Stephen take a paper on purpose to watch the ship-news; for John sails captain of a fruiter to the Mediterranean, and, sure enough, its little gilt figure-head that goes dipping in the foam is nothing else than the Sister of Charity.

SCUPPAUG.

The crowd was decidedly a heterogeneous one on the edge of which I stood at eight o’clock, A.M., one scorching July morning, under an awning at the end of a rickety pier, waiting for the excursion-steamer which was to convey us to the distant sand-banks over which the clear waters lap, away down below the green-sloped highlands of Neversink,—­sea-shoal banks, from which silvery fishes were warning us off with their waving fins.

Now the crowd, being a heterogeneous one, as I have said, had the vulgar element pervading it to a dominant extent.  It consisted mainly of such “common people,” indeed, that no person of exquisite refinement would have thought of feeling his way through it, unless his hands were protected by what Aminadab Sleek calls “little goat-gloves.”  And yet there is another style of mitten, a large, unshapely, bloated knuckle-fender, stuffed with curled hair, that might be far more appropriate to the operation of shouldering in among such “muscular Christians” as the majority around, on the occasion to which I refer.

In the resorts to which habitual tipplers have recourse for consolation of the spirituous kind, a cheap variety is usually on hand to meet exigencies,—­the exigency of a commercial crisis, for instance, when the last lonely dime of the drinker is painfully extracted from the pocket, to be replaced by seven inconsiderable cents.  This abomination is termed “all sorts” by the publican and his indispensable sinner.  It is the accumulation of the drainage of innumerable gone drinks,—­fancy and otherwise.  The exquisite in the “little goat-gloves” would not hob-nob with me in that execrable beverage; no more would I with him; and yet one of its components may be the aristocratic Champagne.  In the social elements of a water-excursion-party may be found the “all sorts” of a particular kind of city-life,—­the good of it and the bad of it, with a dash of something that is very low.  But I am going to talk about the thing as I found it,—­the rough side of the social mill-stone; and, seeing that I have suffered nothing by contact with it, I suppose no harm will come to such as listen to the little I have got to say on the subject.