This was in January of 1850, and I am driven to curiosity as to the subsequent career of the young German savant, who in that state of American political evolution was capable of drawing the horoscope of a nation, as it has been in recent times fulfilled; who saw in the crude notions of political economy of that prosperous yesterday the germs of the political blunders and errors of to-day.  I drew his portrait, I made a few studies of sea and sky, but for the most part the sensation of simple existence under the conditions of illimitable freedom in space, with no reminder of anything beyond, was sufficient for me.  I used to lie on my back on the roof of the wheel-house and look into the sky, and try to make friends with the sea-gulls which sailed around over me, curiously peering down with their dove-like eyes as if to see what this thing might be.  Then the nights, so luminous with the “breeming” of the sea as we got into the Gulf Stream, and the flitting and sudden population of the ocean, always bringing us surprises; the more exciting and delightful storms which came on us in the region in which they were always to be expected, and which, though we had some that made lying in one’s berth difficult, were never enough to satisfy my desire for rough weather,—­all these things filled my life so full of the pure delight in nature that when, at the end of nearly three weeks at sea, we came in sight of the Irish coast, I hated the land.  Life was enough under the sea conditions, and the prospect of the return to the limitations of living amongst men was absolute pain.

We made Liverpool in twenty-one days from New York, and the steamer which had left that port the next week did not arrive till three or four days after, so that my waiting for the letter of credit involved a hotel bill which nearly exhausted my money in hand.  The kindly captain, knowing my circumstances, made the hotel keeper throw off fifty per cent. of his bill (for I went to the “captain’s hotel"), and thus I succeeded in getting to London with the money which was to have paid my expenses for six weeks (according to the careful calculations I had made, at the rate of a pound a week) reduced to provision for three, after which Providence was expected to provide me with a passage home.  In these weeks I had planned to see Turner’s pictures, Copley Fielding’s, with Creswick’s, and all the others Ruskin had mentioned.  But the railways and hotels had never come into my arithmetic, and that was always, and remains, my weak point.  However, the letter of credit was for fifty pounds, and so I felt justified in my faith in Providence, my brother going to the general credit of that account.

CHAPTER VI

ART STUDY IN ENGLAND