Here is a very red-faced and hot individual, with punch-coloured breeches and gaiters, disputing “one brandy too much” in his bill, and vowing that the company shall hear of it when he returns to England.  There, a tall, elderly woman, with a Scotch-grey eye, and a sharp cheek-bone, is depositing within her muff various seizable articles, that, until now, had been lying quietly in her trunk.  Yonder, that raw-looking young gentleman, with the crumpled frock-coat, and loose cravat, and sea-sick visage, is asking every one “if they think he may land without a passport.”  You scarcely recognise him for the cigar-smoking dandy of yesterday, that talked as if he had lived half his life on the continent.  While there, a rather pretty girl is looking intently at some object in the blue water, beside the rudder post.  You are surprised you cannot make it out; but then, she has the advantage of you, for the tall, well-looking man, with the knowing whiskers, is evidently whispering something in her ear.

“Steward, this is not my trunk—­mine was a leather—­”

“All the ‘leathers’ are gone in the first boat, sir.”

“Most scandalous way of doing business.”

“Trouble you for two-and-sixpence, sir.”

“There’s Matilda coughing again,” says a thin, shrewish woman, with a kind of triumphant scowl at her better half; “but you would have her wear that thin shawl!”

“Whatever may be the fault of the shawl, I fancy no one will reproach her ancles for thinness,” murmurs a young Guard’s man, as he peeps up the companion-ladder.

Amid all the Babel of tongues, and uproar of voices, the thorough bass of the escape steam keeps up its infernal thunders, till the very brain reels, and, sick as you have been of the voyage, you half wish yourself once more at sea, if only to have a moment of peace and tranquillity.

Numbers now throng the deck who have never made their appearance before.  Pale, jaundiced, and crumpled, they have all the sea-sick look and haggard cheek of the real martyr—­all except one, a stout, swarthy, brown-visaged man, of about forty, with a frame of iron, and a voice like the fourth string of a violincello.  You wonder why he should have taken to his bed:  learn, then, that he is his Majesty’s courier from the foreign office, going with despatches to Constantinople, and that as he is not destined to lie down in a bed for the next fourteen days, he is glad even of the narrow resemblance to one, he finds in the berth of a steam-boat.  At length you are on shore, and marched off in a long string, like a gang of convicts to the Bureau de l’octroi, and here is begun an examination of the luggage, which promises, from its minuteness, to last for the three months you destined to spend in Switzerland.  At the end of an hour you discover that the soi disant commissionaire will transact all this affair for a few francs; and, after a tiresome wait in a filthy room, jostled, elbowed, and trampled upon, by boors with sabots, you adjourn to your inn, and begin to feel that you are not in England.