parents.  I had no apprehension, from the moment that one of the ship-owners who was in business relations with my elder brother offered me a free passage on one of his sailing ships to Liverpool, that I should not find a similar bridge back again; and with my thirty dollars changed into six sovereigns, and a little valise with only a change of clothes, I went on board the Garrick, a packet of the Black Ball line, sailing in the last days of December, 1849.  There had been a thaw and the Hudson River was full of floating ice, which in the ebbing of the tide endangered the shipping lying out in the stream, and the captain made such haste to get out of the danger (the extent of which was shown by the topmasts of an Austrian brig, showing above water where she had been sunk by the floating ice) that the ship had her anchor apeak before the boat which carried my brother and myself out could reach it.  We barely arrived in time for me to get aboard, the difficulty of threading our way amongst the masses of ice making our boating difficult.  That my childish faith in Providence was a family trait might be deduced from the fact that my brother, who had from boyhood stood to me in loco parentis, had not asked me, until I was on the point of going aboard, what my means of subsistence were, and, when he found that I had only my six sovereigns, he told me to wait at Liverpool for a letter of credit he would send me by the steamer which followed.

That voyage is one of the most delightful memories of my life.  I loved the sea; and every phase of it, storm or calm, was a new joy.  I had one fellow-passenger, a German doctor of philosophy, Dr. Seemann, who had been an ardent radical in Germany, and had been studying in the United States the development of political intelligence under democratic conditions, returning to his native land with the profound conviction that democratic government was destined to be a failure.  We had hot debates on the subject, in which the doctor adduced his conversations with the intelligent farmers of New England, whom he had especially studied, to show that their political education was such as to endanger the best interests of the community from its extreme superficiality; I, with an unfaltering faith in the processes of universal suffrage, disputed his conclusions, so hotly in fact that we quarreled and he took one side of the quarter-deck for his promenades and I the other.  But the conditions of sea life, with a companionship limited to two persons, are such that no quarrel that was not mortal, or from rivalry in the affections of a woman, could endure many days, and after a few such days we drew to the same side of the deck and were better friends than before, but we dropped politics.