If they discern no such indications,
they will consider me altogether mistaken - but not wilfully.
Prejudiced, I am not, and never have been, otherwise than in favour
of the United States. I have many friends in America, I feel a
grateful interest in the country, I hope and believe it will
successfully work out a problem of the highest importance to the
whole human race. To represent me as viewing AMERICA with ill-
nature, coldness, or animosity, is merely to do a very foolish
thing: which is always a very easy one.
CHAPTER I - GOING AWAY
I SHALL never forget the one-fourth serious and three-fourths
comical astonishment, with which, on the morning of the third of
January eighteen-hundred-and-forty-two, I opened the door of, and
put my head into, a 'state-room' on board the Britannia steam-
packet, twelve hundred tons burthen per register, bound for Halifax
and Boston, and carrying Her Majesty's mails.
That this state-room had been specially engaged for 'Charles
Dickens, Esquire, and Lady,' was rendered sufficiently clear even
to my scared intellect by a very small manuscript, announcing the
fact, which was pinned on a very flat quilt, covering a very thin
mattress, spread like a surgical plaster on a most inaccessible
shelf.
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