THE BURDEN WHEREOF, IS HAIL COLUMBIA!  
A dark and dreary night; people nestling in their beds or circling late about the fire; Want, colder than Charity, shivering at the street corners; church-towers humming with the faint vibration of their own tongues, but newly resting from the ghostly preachment ‘One!’ The earth covered with a sable pall as for the burial of yesterday; the clumps of dark trees, its giant plumes of funeral feathers, waving sadly to and fro: all hushed, all noiseless, and in deep repose, save the swift clouds that skim across the moon, and the cautious wind, as, creeping after them upon the ground, it stops to listen, and goes rustling on, and stops again, and follows, like a savage on the trail.
Whither go the clouds and wind so eagerly? If, like guilty spirits, they repair to some dread conference with powers like themselves, in what wild regions do the elements hold council, or where unbend in terrible disport?
Here! Free from that cramped prison called the earth, and out upon the waste of waters. Here, roaring, raging, shrieking, howling, all night long. Hither come the sounding voices from the caverns on the coast of that small island, sleeping, a thousand miles away, so quietly in the midst of angry waves; and hither, to meet them, rush the blasts from unknown desert places of the world. Here, in the fury of their unchecked liberty, they storm and buffet with each other, until the sea, lashed into passion like their own, leaps up, in ravings mightier than theirs, and the whole scene is madness.
On, on, on, over the countless miles of angry space roll the long heaving billows. Mountains and caves are here, and yet are not; for what is now the one, is now the other; then all is but a boiling heap of rushing water. Pursuit, and flight, and mad return of wave on wave, and savage struggle, ending in a spouting-up of foam that whitens the black night; incessant change of place, and form, and hue; constancy in nothing, but eternal strife; on, on, on, they roll, and darker grows the night, and louder howls the wind, and more clamorous and fierce become the million voices in the sea, when the wild cry goes forth upon the storm ‘A ship!’
Onward she comes, in gallant combat with the elements, her tall masts trembling, and her timbers starting on the strain; onward she comes, now high upon the curling billows, now low down in the hollows of the sea, as hiding for the moment from its fury; and every storm-voice in the air and water cries more loudly yet, ‘A ship!’
Still she comes striving on; and at her boldness and the spreading cry, the angry waves rise up above each other’s hoary heads to look; and round about the vessel, far as the mariners on the decks can pierce into the gloom, they press upon her, forcing each other down and starting up, and rushing forward from afar, in dreadful curiosity. High over her they break; and round her surge and roar; and giving place to others, moaningly depart, and dash themselves to fragments in their baffled anger. Still she comes onward bravely. And though the eager multitude crowd thick and fast upon her all the night, and dawn of day discovers the untiring train yet bearing down upon the ship in an eternity of troubled water, onward she comes, with dim lights burning in her hull, and people there, asleep; as if no deadly element were peering in at every seam and chink, and no drowned seaman’s grave, with but a plank to cover it, were yawning in the unfathomable depths below.
Among these sleeping voyagers were Martin and Mark Tapley, who, rocked into a heavy drowsiness by the unaccustomed motion, were as insensible to the foul air in which they lay, as to the uproar without. It was broad day when the latter awoke with a dim idea that he was dreaming of having gone to sleep in a four-post bedstead which had turned bottom upwards in the course of the night. There was more reason in this too, than in the roasting of eggs; for the first objects Mr Tapley recognized when he opened his eyes were his own heels—looking down to him, as he afterwards observed, from a nearly perpendicular elevation.
‘Well!’ said Mark, getting himself into a sitting posture, after various ineffectual struggles with the rolling of the ship. ‘This is the first time as ever I stood on my head all night.’
‘You shouldn’t go to sleep upon the ground with your head to leeward then,’ growled a man in one of the berths.
‘With my head to where?’ asked Mark.
The man repeated his previous sentiment.
‘No, I won’t another time,’ said Mark, ‘when I know whereabouts on the map that country is. In the meanwhile I can give you a better piece of advice. Don’t you nor any other friend of mine never go to sleep with his head in a ship any more.’
The man gave a grunt of discontented acquiescence, turned over in his berth, and drew his blanket over his head.
‘—For,’ said Mr Tapley, pursuing the theme by way of soliloquy in a low tone of voice; ‘the sea is as nonsensical a thing as any going. It never knows what to do with itself. It hasn’t got no employment for its mind, and is always in a state of vacancy. Like them Polar bears in the wild-beast shows as is constantly a-nodding their heads from side to side, it never can be quiet. Which is entirely owing to its uncommon stupidity.’
‘Is that you, Mark?’ asked a faint voice from another berth.
‘It’s as much of me as is left, sir, after a fortnight of this work,’ Mr Tapley replied, ‘What with leading the life of a fly, ever since I’ve been aboard—for I’ve been perpetually holding-on to something or other in a upside-down position—what with that, sir, and putting a very little into myself, and taking a good deal out of myself, there an’t too much of me to swear by. How do you find yourself this morning, sir?’
‘Very miserable,’ said Martin, with a peevish groan. ‘Ugh. This is wretched, indeed!’
‘Creditable,’ muttered Mark, pressing one hand upon his aching head and looking round him with a rueful grin. ‘That’s the great comfort. It is creditable to keep up one’s spirits here. Virtue’s its own reward. So’s jollity.’
Mark was so far right that unquestionably any man who retained his cheerfulness among the steerage accommodations of that noble and fast-sailing line-of-packet ship, ‘The Screw,’ was solely indebted to his own resources, and shipped his good humour, like his provisions, without any contribution or assistance from the owners. A dark, low, stifling cabin, surrounded by berths all filled to overflowing with men, women, and children, in various stages of sickness and misery, is not the liveliest place of assembly at any time; but when it is so crowded (as the steerage cabin of the Screw was, every passage out), that mattresses and beds are heaped upon the floor, to the extinction of everything like comfort, cleanliness, and decency, it is liable to operate not only as a pretty strong banner against amiability of temper, but as a positive encourager of selfish and rough humours. Mark felt this, as he sat looking about him; and his spirits rose proportionately.
There were English people, Irish people, Welsh people, and Scotch people there; all with their little store of coarse food and shabby clothes; and nearly all with their families of children. There were children of all ages; from the baby at the breast, to the slattern-girl who was as much a grown woman as her mother. Every kind of domestic suffering that is bred in poverty, illness, banishment, sorrow, and long travel in bad weather, was crammed into the little space; and yet was there infinitely less of complaint and querulousness, and infinitely more of mutual assistance and general kindness to be found in that unwholesome ark, than in many brilliant ballrooms.
Mark looked about him wistfully, and his face brightened as he looked. Here an old grandmother was crooning over a sick child, and rocking it to and fro, in arms hardly more wasted than its own young limbs; here a poor woman with an infant in her lap, mended another little creature’s clothes, and quieted another who was creeping up about her from their scanty bed upon the floor. Here were old men awkwardly engaged in little household offices, wherein they would have been ridiculous but for their good-will and kind purpose; and here were swarthy fellows—giants in their way—doing such little acts of tenderness for those about them, as might have belonged to gentlest-hearted dwarfs. The very idiot in the corner who sat mowing there, all day, had his faculty of imitation roused by what he saw about him; and snapped his fingers to amuse a crying child.
‘Now, then,’ said Mark, nodding to a woman who was dressing her three children at no great distance from him—and the grin upon his face had by this time spread from ear to ear—‘Hand over one of them young ‘uns according to custom.’
‘I wish you’d get breakfast, Mark, instead of worrying with people who don’t belong to you,’ observed Martin, petulantly.
‘All right,’ said Mark. ‘She’ll do that. It’s a fair division of labour, sir. I wash her boys, and she makes our tea. I never could make tea, but any one can wash a boy.’
The woman, who was delicate and ill, felt and understood his kindness, as well she might, for she had been covered every night with his greatcoat, while he had for his own bed the bare boards and a rug. But Martin, who seldom got up or looked about him, was quite incensed by the folly of this speech, and expressed his dissatisfaction by an impatient groan.
‘So it is, certainly,’ said Mark, brushing the child’s hair as coolly as if he had been born and bred a barber.
‘What are you talking about, now?’ asked Martin.
‘What you said,’ replied Mark; ‘or what you meant, when you gave that there dismal vent to your feelings. I quite go along with it, sir. It is very hard upon her.’
‘What is?’
‘Making the voyage by herself along with these young impediments here, and going such a way at such a time of the year to join her husband. If you don’t want to be driven mad with yellow soap in your eye, young man,’ said Mr Tapley to the second urchin, who was by this time under his hands at the basin, ‘you’d better shut it.’
‘Where does she join her husband?’ asked Martin, yawning.
‘Why, I’m very much afraid,’ said Mr Tapley, in a low voice, ‘that she don’t know. I hope she mayn’t miss him. But she sent her last letter by hand, and it don’t seem to have been very clearly understood between ‘em without it, and if she don’t see him a-waving his pocket-handkerchief on the shore, like a pictur out of a song-book, my opinion is, she’ll break her heart.’
‘Why, how, in Folly’s name, does the woman come to be on board ship on such a wild-goose venture!’ cried Martin.
Mr Tapley glanced at him for a moment as he lay prostrate in his berth, and then said, very quietly:
‘Ah! How indeed! I can’t think! He’s been away from her for two year; she’s bee............