Читать книгу An Australian Ramble; Or, A Summer in Australia онлайн

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But it is idle to call up what to most of modern readers must be bare names, so soon, in this age of reading and writing and universal progress, do we forget the past. History in these mechanical days is getting as much out of fashion as theology. Let me write of living people; of men and women, poor creatures as they are at the best, to be brushed away as gossamer. There are just upon a thousand of us in the shape of passengers on board the Orizaba, and almost all are happy. The dark figure in the shape of Black Care we have left behind, as we have slipped out of English fog and cold into the region of cloudless nights and starry skies. We smoke, or read, or talk, or walk the deck, in a climate brighter even than that of an English summer in the leafy month of June. The ladies crochet or knit all day long in their lounging-chairs on deck, while the little ones play as if they had no fear or thought of the sea and its everlasting hunger for precious human life, and its cruel storms. What we should do with this unmanageable mass if anything were to go wrong no tongue can tell. All we can do is to hope for the best, for no Parliament will ever go so far as to order that no ship should leave an English port without its sufficient complement of boats; and if they did, no shipowner could carry on a profitable passenger trade. It ought not to be so, I know. What can one do? We are bound to travel, and we take the risk, whatever that may be, and trust to our sailors and captains, who are not half paid for the work they have to do. As it is, there is no life so pleasant as that of life on board one of our great passenger steamships. The Orizaba never rolls—well, only a little. The saloons are beautiful, the living is first-rate, the waiting is excellent, and the sleeping-berths are all that can be desired. By night, with the electric light all along the deck, the scene reminds you of the Arabian Nights, and mirth and music are everywhere; I pity the poor people who have to spend their winter at home. It is now a real pleasure to live. The only thing one misses are the newspapers and the old familiar faces. Well, I am not sorry to be out of the way of the papers; they only make me sick and sore as one reads the daily chronicle of poverty with which no one can grapple, and of crime which it seems impossible to repress, and the twaddle which envelops all. And as to the familiar faces, the further one travels the more one realizes all their loveliness and charm. For once the poet is right; absence does make the heart grow fonder.