The Steam-Packet: A Tale of the River and the Ocean — page 111: what you’re looking at

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

78 THE STEAM PACKET. for he had noticed ®n the preceding day that his new companion was particularly attentive to Belinda; and it struck the worthy man that the words ‘‘ The Countess of Noodleton ” would look uncommonly well upon a card, especially when that card bore the style and oa of his own daughter. In the meantime Captain Pentonville and Aramintha were also engaged in conversation together. ‘When shall we arrive at Dunkirk, Augustus?” deuiahiaed the young lady, as soon as she was Letiueiedl that the porpoise had now disappeared altogether. ‘‘ At about three o’clock, beloved one,” was the answer. ‘ At that: hour, Aramintha, you will set foot upon the territory of the sia F ravebeneeiie land of poetry—the land of romance—the land o chivalry !” ; ‘*Ah! how I should dase to visit the climes of the sunny south, exclaimed Aramintha, ‘‘ and behold the beauteous creatures Mw ies resemble those of the gazelle.”’ Captain Pentonville murmured an approval of the wish;—but he did not condescend to inform his sentimental companion, that the beauteous creatures to whom she alluded had eyes in reality like those of human beings; while Miss Aramintha herself was in a kind of perplexed ignorance as to what sort of an animala a might be. The sea was as calm as the Thames at Greenwich, and the sun was unobscured by a single‘cloud above. But the weather was not beautiful only: upon the sea: it was a joyous day altogether. It was, in a word, one of those rare and precious days for whose boon all that lives in- sensibly give thanks—and when life itself is gratitude ;—one of those days when Nature seems to be surcharged with the spirit of love; so that even the most misanthropical and pertinaciously wretched of fears is imperceptibly moved out of its self-erected charnel-house; and the slow pulse dances, and the dull eye lightens up, and the marble cheek glows red; and the patient in his confinement has the casement raised, and another pillow placed beneath his languid head; and mothers may be seen, the country through, carrying abroad their pale and sickly progeny to take their share of God’s blessing, and bathe in the warm and limpid air; and sons and daughters propping up their aged sire or dame, as they totter out to bask their chilled frames in the sunshine once more, and freshly dream of life’s morning glow, and look back over the long hill of existence to the garden on the other side where the sun always shone ;—one of those days, in fine, when it seems to be the purpose of God to give to all his children, both the : ry = Gomichbooks:.co “ - £ F _ “ hn s of 4 J *