Читать книгу Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (Vol.1&2). Letters & Travel Sketches from Europe онлайн

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There are always some three or four in a hundred who escape all these evils. They are not sick, and they seem to be having a good time generally, and always meet you with "What a charming run we are having! Isn't it delightful?" and so on. If you have a turn for being disinterested, you can console your miseries by a view of their joyousness. Three or four of our ladies were of this happy order, and it was really refreshing to see them.

For my part, I was less fortunate. I could not and would not give up and become one of the ghosts below, and so I managed, by keeping on deck and trying to act as if nothing was the matter, to lead a very uncertain and precarious existence, though with a most awful undertone of emotion, which seemed to make quite another thing of creation.

I wonder that people who wanted to break the souls of heroes and martyrs never thought of sending them to sea and keeping them a little seasick. The dungeons of Olmutz, the leads of Venice, in short, all the naughty, wicked places that tyrants ever invented for bringing down the spirits of heroes, are nothing to the berth of a ship. Get Lafayette, Kossuth, or the noblest of woman, born, prostrate in a swinging, dizzy berth of one of these sea coops, called state rooms, and I'll warrant almost any compromise might be got out of them.