I was provided with a receipt and duly and officially accepted as an excursionist.  There was happiness in that but it was tame compared to the novelty of being “select.”

This supplementary program also instructed the excursionists to provide themselves with light musical instruments for amusement in the ship, with saddles for Syrian travel, green spectacles and umbrellas, veils for Egypt, and substantial clothing to use in rough pilgrimizing in the Holy Land.  Furthermore, it was suggested that although the ship’s library would afford a fair amount of reading matter, it would still be well if each passenger would provide himself with a few guidebooks, a Bible, and some standard works of travel.  A list was appended, which consisted chiefly of books relating to the Holy Land, since the Holy Land was part of the excursion and seemed to be its main feature.

Reverend Henry Ward Beecher was to have accompanied the expedition, but urgent duties obliged him to give up the idea.  There were other passengers who could have been spared better and would have been spared more willingly.  Lieutenant General Sherman was to have been of the party also, but the Indian war compelled his presence on the plains.  A popular actress had entered her name on the ship’s books, but something interfered and she couldn’t go.  The “Drummer Boy of the Potomac” deserted, and lo, we had never a celebrity left!

However, we were to have a “battery of guns” from the Navy Department (as per advertisement) to be used in answering royal salutes; and the document furnished by the Secretary of the Navy, which was to make “General Sherman and party” welcome guests in the courts and camps of the old world, was still left to us, though both document and battery, I think, were shorn of somewhat of their original august proportions.  However, had not we the seductive program still, with its Paris, its Constantinople, Smyrna, Jerusalem, Jericho, and “our friends the Bermudians?” What did we care?

CHAPTER II.

Occasionally, during the following month, I dropped in at 117 Wall Street to inquire how the repairing and refurnishing of the vessel was coming on, how additions to the passenger list were averaging, how many people the committee were decreeing not “select” every day and banishing in sorrow and tribulation.  I was glad to know that we were to have a little printing press on board and issue a daily newspaper of our own.  I was glad to learn that our piano, our parlor organ, and our melodeon were to be the best instruments of the kind that could be had in the market.  I was proud to observe that among our excursionists were three ministers of the gospel, eight doctors, sixteen or eighteen ladies, several military and naval chieftains with sounding titles, an ample crop of “Professors” of various kinds, and a gentleman who had “Commissioner of the United states of America