The Steam-Packet: A Tale of the River and the Ocean — page 106: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE STEAM PACKET. Lae. CHAPTER VIII. _. IN WHICH, AFTER A BRIEF SOJOURN AT MARGATE, THE LUMINARIES ne PROCEED ON THEIR VOYAGE TO DUNKIRK,.—A QUADRILLE ON DECK, | AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.—VOCAL HARMONY. As all the world has visited Mar- gate, so will all the world be pleased to find that our Luminaries did not intend to make a very long stay there, they having resolved at the debate held after dinner, to proceed to Dunkirk on the following day. You may talk of the frigidity of ca- loric—the fragrance of asafcetida— or the airy gracefulness of an ele- phant ;—you may extract the square root of nothing, and present the pro- duct to a public charity;—or by | chance you may be enabled to dis- cover the parish settlement of the Man in the Moon; and you may rest satisfied that most people will think you a very singular, if not a very clever fellow: but to say anything new about Margate—to find out anything about it that has been left unsaid—or to succeed in convey- ing a better idea of the place by another chapter of descriptive detail, or detailed description, than has hitherto been done—would puzzle even the man who could accomplish the feats previously mentioned. Old ladies—learned in the etiquette of the tea-table, and profound in the manipulation of shrimps;—young gentlemen from London, whose means of existence are as mysteriously procured as the suste- nance which is always supposed to attend upon knights-errant in the old romances, there being no conceivable source from which they might be suspected to: flow ;—young ladies, who, like Miss Pifpaf, were on the most intimate terms with the Corsair, and have made the Giaour their own ;—old gentlemen, who find out each other’s names at the Library by seeing them written in their hats ;—maiden aunts, who, when they preside at the tea-table, invariably ask their brother, sister, nephews, and nieces, whether they take milk and sugar, although, having lived with them for twenty years, they ought to have been pretty well acquainted with their tastes ;—youths, sporting huge pea- (EOPMICLOOO_ KS ye