The man at the helm is shut up in a little
house in the fore part of the boat (the wheel being connected with
the rudder by iron chains, working the whole length of the deck);
and the passengers, unless the weather be very fine indeed, usually
congregate below. Directly you have left the wharf, all the life,
and stir, and bustle of a packet cease. You wonder for a long time
how she goes on, for there seems to be nobody in charge of her; and
when another of these dull machines comes splashing by, you feel
quite indignant with it, as a sullen cumbrous, ungraceful,
unshiplike leviathan: quite forgetting that the vessel you are on
board of, is its very counterpart.
There is always a clerk's office on the lower deck, where you pay
your fare; a ladies' cabin; baggage and stowage rooms; engineer's
room; and in short a great variety of perplexities which render the
discovery of the gentlemen's cabin, a matter of some difficulty.
It often occupies the whole length of the boat (as it did in this
case), and has three or four tiers of berths on each side. When I
first descended into the cabin of the New York, it looked, in my
unaccustomed eyes, about as long as the Burlington Arcade.
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