feel like writing compliments then, and therefore was afraid to speak of the cruise lest I might be betrayed into using other than complimentary language.  However, I reflected that it would be a just and righteous thing to go down and write a kind word for the Hadjis—­Hadjis are people who have made the pilgrimage—­because parties not interested could not do it so feelingly as I, a fellow-Hadji, and so I penned the valedictory.  I have read it, and read it again; and if there is a sentence in it that is not fulsomely complimentary to captain, ship and passengers, I can not find it.  If it is not a chapter that any company might be proud to have a body write about them, my judgment is fit for nothing.  With these remarks I confidently submit it to the unprejudiced judgment of the reader: 

     Return of the holy land excursionists—­the story of the cruise.

     To the editor of the herald: 

The steamer Quaker City has accomplished at last her extraordinary voyage and returned to her old pier at the foot of Wall street.  The expedition was a success in some respects, in some it was not.  Originally it was advertised as a “pleasure excursion.”  Well, perhaps, it was a pleasure excursion, but certainly it did not look like one; certainly it did not act like one.  Any body’s and every body’s notion of a pleasure excursion is that the parties to it will of a necessity be young and giddy and somewhat boisterous.  They will dance a good deal, sing a good deal, make love, but sermonize very little.  Any body’s and every body’s notion of a well conducted funeral is that there must be a hearse and a corpse, and chief mourners and mourners by courtesy, many old people, much solemnity, no levity, and a prayer and a sermon withal.  Three-fourths of the Quaker City’s passengers were between forty and seventy years of age!  There was a picnic crowd for you!  It may be supposed that the other fourth was composed of young girls.  But it was not.  It was chiefly composed of rusty old bachelors and a child of six years.  Let us average the ages of the Quaker City’s pilgrims and set the figure down as fifty years.  Is any man insane enough to imagine that this picnic of patriarchs sang, made love, danced, laughed, told anecdotes, dealt in ungodly levity?  In my experience they sinned little in these matters.  No doubt it was presumed here at home that these frolicsome veterans laughed and sang and romped all day, and day after day, and kept up a noisy excitement from one end of the ship to the other; and that they played blind-man’s buff or danced quadrilles and waltzes on moonlight evenings on the quarter-deck; and that at odd moments of unoccupied time they jotted a laconic item or two in the journals they opened on such an elaborate plan when they left home, and then skurried off to their whist and euchre labors under the