The Gentleman's Magazine Volume 1 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A RUN FOR THE ATLANTIC RECORD. GOOD, and very good it may be, to hug salt-water in wooden walls, under mast and sail, winds filled with charming uncertainties, like sweethearting. But really, being sailoring, what can compare to the throb of splendid life there is in a crack Atlantic liner scouring the sea ! Ours, too, was the prettiest run imaginable from New York, that strident sentinel of a kinsfolk's shore, across the September waves to Southampton, most kindly of the great English seaports. Saving a two days' much-tossed ocean, we should certainly have broken the record, Sandy Hook to the Needles. As things went, we came within a few minutes of doing it; only that is getting ahead of the story, and the how-it-is-done and the what-life-is on board an Atlantic greyhound. A blackish drizzle was over New York and the Hudson River, and the North River, and Hoboken, the other side of the North River, where the Normannia lay leashed to the Hamburg-American Packet Company's pier, until the hour should arrive for starting. A monster she looked, against the background of quays and warehouses, her big funnels smoking sedately into the heavens. Yet, get the Normannia out on the waters and how her immense size would disappear in a series of graceful lines and what a beautiful picture of buoyant symmetry she would present Between ship and pier, along three or four wide gangways, there was an incessant movement of passengers bidding good-bye to friends, of friends taking farewell of passengers, of porters trundling the baggage and the mails on board. About the departure of a liner, no matter from what corner of the globe, no matter where bound, there is always something at once sad and elating. There is the sadness of the good-byes, the tears, the strained faces; and there is the...