The Argosy — page 261: what you’re looking at

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

203 BOARD-SHIP FRIENDSHIPS. HOSE who have occasion to cross the Channel now and then must have often speculated—that 1s to say, 1f they were not sea- sick—upon the idiosyncrasies of their fellow-passengers. Similar people are met every day in the streets and in places of public enter- tainment, but are rarely given a moment’s thought. The sea is, however, a great leveller—of conventionalities as well as of other things—and so persons who would never think of recognising one another ashore will be found conversing and friendly afloat. But if civilities can be interchanged between persons who are strangers to each other on the short run across from Dover to Calais, or Kingstown to Holyhead, how much more are the amenities of our social life admissible on an ocean-going steamer—one, say, to India or America? In the latter situation friendships—or, perhaps, enmities—take the place of an hour’s chatty conversation ; and so it not infrequently happens that a friendship hastily contracted on board ship will influence a person’s whole life for good or evil. In the old novels of Indian life it is amusing to note the importance which the novelists attach to board-ship friendships. Young ladies are especially warned to be very careful about the friendships they make in a voyage in one of the old Indiamen of the period. They are recommended to treat their fellow passengers with an air of digni- fed but courteous reserve, and to wear a noli-me-tangere expression always, when in the society of the ship’s officers or the cadets. Nor was the advice to be altogether despised, because it is a truism of all times, and in all the vessels that sail the seas, that it is much easier to fall into a friendship on board ship than to fall out of one. One of the commonest of travelling characters met with at sea is the man who is all warmth and kindliness at first. He helps you with your luggage, he offers a light for a cigar, he directs you to the chief steward’s den, or he performs any one of those thousand trifling but graceful offices which serve to lay the lines of a board-ship friendship. : This amiable creature, whom for the present you don’t know from Adam, is evidently taken with you, and, if you have the average amount of vanity accorded every human being, you cannot but feel flattered by his preference. For there are dozens of other persons on board to whom he might as genially attach himself; but he admires you alone. You think that you and he must have sympathies in common, and accept his advances with a good grace. He says he will sit next you at dinner, and you agree. Then you find out more about him. He may be a Collector of Koochperwanee, in Bengal, or an American Senator, or a China tea-taster, or an Australian GOGO S (SO) mn _