Feeling his way into the circle with a stick, there came a poor blind man, of diminutive stature, squeezing beneath his left arm a suffocating accordion, which, every now and then, as he stumbled against the uneven planks of the wharf, gave a querulous squeak, doleful in its cadence as the feeble quavers evoked by Mr. William Davidge, comedian, from the asthmatic clarionet of Jem Bags, in the farce of the “Wandering Minstrel.”

“Come, b’hoys!” cried Lobster Bob, “let’s have a squeeze of music from Billy, afore the boat comes up”; and, plumping down one of his creels in the middle of the crowd, he lifted up the musician, and seated him upon the rough, cold oysters,—­a throne fitter, certainly, for a follower of Neptune than a votary of Apollo.  One of the roughs danced an ungraceful measure to the music of the accordion, mimicking, as he did so, the queer contortions into which the musician twisted his features in perfect harmony with his woful strains.  All of them were gentle to the blind man, though, as if his darkness had brought to them a ray of light; and presently one of them takes off the musician’s cap, drops into it a silver dime, and goes the rounds of the throng with many jocose appeals in favor of the owner, to whom he presently returns it in a condition of silver lining analogous to, but more substantial than that of the poet’s cloud.

But now the poor music of the accordion was quite extinguished by the bellowing of the brazen horns of the “cotillon band” on the deck of our expected steamer, as she rounded to from the upper piers at which she had been taking in excursionists.  This caused a stir in the crowd under the awning, many of whom were fathers of families taking their wives and children out for a rare holiday.  The smallest babies had not been left at home, but were there in all their primary scarletude, set off by the whitest of lace-frilled caps trimmed with the bluest of ribbons.  And now came the time for these small choristers to take up the “wondrous tale”; for the big horns had ceased to wrangle, and the crushing and rushing of the crowd woke up infancy to a sense of its wrongs and a consciousness of the necessity for action.

There were some nice-looking girls around, neatly dressed, too, though by no means in their Sunday-best; for la petite New-Yorkaise is aware of the mishaps to be encountered by those who venture far out to sea in ships.  They had sweethearts with them, for the most part, or brothers, or cousins, mayhap:  but they were sadly neglected by these protectors, as we stood under the awning on the pier; for the male mind was full of fishing, and the male hands were employed in making up tackle with a most unscientific kind of skill.