There is a physiognomy in luggage, distinct as in clothes; and a strange variety, not uninteresting.  How significant, for instance, of the owner is the weather-beaten, battered old portmanteau of the travelling bachelor, embrowned with age, out of shape, yet still strong and serviceable!—­a business-like receptacle, which, like him, has travelled thousands of miles, been rudely knocked about, weighed, carried hither and thither, encrusted with the badges of hotels as an old vessel is with barnacles, grim and reserved like its master, and never lost or gone astray.

Now the engines and their trains glide away home.  The shadowy figures stand round in crowds.  To the reflecting mind there is something bewildering and even mournful in the survey of this huge agglomeration and of its owners, the muffled, shadowy figures, some three hundred in number, grouped together, and who will be dispersed again in a few hours.

A yacht-voyage could not be more tranquilly delightful than this pleasant moonlight transit.  We are scarcely clear of the twinkling lights of the Dover amphitheatre, grown more and more distant, when those of the opposite coast appear to draw near and yet nearer.  Often as one has crossed, the sense of a new and strange impression is never wanting.  The sense of calm and silence, the great waste of sea, the monotonous ‘plash’ of the paddle-wheels, the sort of solitude in the midst of such a crowd, the gradually lengthening distance behind, with the lessening, as gradual, in front, and the always novel feeling of approach to a new country—­these elements impart a sort of dreamy, poetical feeling to the scene.  Even the calm resignation of the wrapped-up shadows seated in a sort of retreat, and devoted to their own thoughts or slumbers, add to this effect.  With which comes the thought of the brave little vessels, which through day and night, year after year, dance over these uncertain waters in ‘all weathers,’ as it is termed.  When the night is black as Erebus, and the sea in its fury boiling and raging over the pier, the Lord Warden with its storm-shutters up, and timid guests removed to more sheltered quarters, the very stones of the pier shaken from their places by the violence of the monster outside—­the little craft, wrapping its mantle about its head, goes out fearlessly, and, emerging from the harbour to be flung about, battered with wild fury, forces her way on through the night, which its gallant sailors call, with truth, ‘an awful one.’

While busy with these thoughts I take note of a little scene of comedy, or perhaps of a farcical kind, which is going on near me, in which two ‘Harrys’ of the purest kind were engaged, and whose oddities lightened the tediousness of the passage.  One had seen foreign parts, and was therefore regarded with reverence by his companion.

They were promenading the deck, and the following dialogue was borne to me in snatches: 

First Harry (interrogatively, and astonished):  ‘Eh? no!  Now, really?’